


Under The Road

by AshToSilver



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood and Gore, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, M/M, Recovery, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-07-25 08:26:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7525546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshToSilver/pseuds/AshToSilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bitten and turned as a child, Bruce Wayne has spent a lifetime struggling to come to turns with his curse - until Ra’s al Ghul gives him an adult body and teaches him what one man can do with immortality. Bruce returns to Gotham with every intention of making sure nobody ever meets his fate again, but his mission is not as easy as it looks. Between a chaotic clown and a budding protégé, Bruce has to learn the one thing he never learned the first time round; how to love someone and not fuck it up horribly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Give and Take](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7185590) by [AshToSilver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshToSilver/pseuds/AshToSilver). 



> Hey everyone! I hope you like vampires and angst because boy is there a lot of it here. I will probably end up single-handedly supplying most of the vampire!batjokes fics but fuck it, vampire AUs. All aboard for blood drinking and brooding and also maybe smut and kink??
> 
> I plan to update every 1-2 weeks and you have permission to scream into my [ask box on Tumblr](http://ashtosilver.tumblr.com/ask) if I fail to do so on a regular basis. Everyone say thank you to [rosemarybagels](http://rosemarybagels.tumblr.com/) for being a fabulous beta.
> 
>  **TW:** some deaths (not all permanent), gore and injuries, a lot of blood (not always being eaten), sad immortal children and probably some other stuff. I swear there's a happy ending, there's just lots of... gross-fiddly bits.

Bruce Wayne dies eight years old on the cold, hard pavement of Park Row, Downtown Gotham on November 12th, 1982.

Bruce dies choking on blood and acidic venom, his lower spine cracked and his legs just barely twitching, his hands the only thing about him with any strength. He dies, pinned beneath a man, a creature that smells like rot and ash, his small fingers tightly wrapped around his father’s coat sleeve and his lungs whistling as teeth tear at a half-collapsed windpipe.

To the end of his days - which are not here, not now - Bruce will never know what causes his monster, his killer, his saviour to detach from his throat and leave. Perhaps there is a sound, perhaps someone is coming.

But Bruce dies before he can find out, his heart stuttering faster than his lungs can protest until it can stutter no more. He dies, the last of his family, only a child, so cold and so alone with tears in his eyes, blood in his throat, acid in his mouth.

He wakes with a scream that’s heard all the way to the shore.

* * *

Alfred is twelve minutes late and it saves his life.

Leslie Thompkins has worked in Park Row since she graduated med school in the same class as Thomas Wayne, three names before him. Her clinic was a dream drawn on a bar napkin in 1971, her words slurred and her eyes were bright with a half-remembered pain but she knew what she was talking about.

Martha, engagement ring still fresh on her finger, had been the one to call Thomas’ lawyers, but the cost was nothing to a man set to inherit almost four hundred million, a man set to die with almost twice that. They’d bought the building as a graduation gift to their friend and thought nothing of it. They wanted to help. They wanted to give.

And Alfred had been dropping the Waynes off and picking them back up from the clinic since it had a _for sale_ sign in its window. He’d been press-ganged to paint walls and carry wounded patients from cars and he’d grasped Thomas’ shoulder in the nurses break room during the early winter of 1973 when all his employer, his friend, his brother could say was “ _I’m going to be a father,_ ” over and over.

Alfred is twelve minutes late and Leslie has been gone even longer. He’d cursed the traffic and hadn’t known that Leslie had been forced to go a few minutes early, leaving Thomas and Martha and Bruce standing outside the locked building in the dead of night. Leaving his family, his charges, his friends with nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. 

If he’d been on time- if he’d been on time, the Waynes may have been okay or maybe Alfred would be dead, but the thing is, Alfred can never know and never will. But he’s twelve minutes late anyway and the building is clearly locked and dark when he pulls up the bentley and flicks the headlights.

There’s not even a sound and honestly, his first thought is irritation, because Thomas _would_ hang back in an alleyway to keep his family out on the lightly-falling snow and he knows Martha is not the type to care either way. Bruce - who is too intelligent and too young for his own good most days - would be smart enough to stand in the glow of the streetlight, but he can’t see anyone.

His second thought is barely that - it’s a prickle down his spine, a feeling of _wrong_ that’s never been a lie. Alfred’s only two years older than Thomas but he’s got smarts and skills his friend will never have. Alfred had grown up beside him under his uncle’s service to Thomas’ parents and the only time they’ve been apart for any considerable amount is when Alfred had returned to England to serve.

He’d done his four years in the British Army in the last, stuttering breaths of the Vietnam war, on the tail ends of Aden and Indonesia and while he’d never set foot in those places he’d seen what it had done to others, and he knew to trust a bad feeling.

Fortunately, Martha is far more sensible than her husband, so the glove compartment hides an unloaded gun. He’s honestly never thought as to why she assumed it necessary, but Martha is wrong even less than he is and he loads it with a practiced ease, the easy weight providing a cold reassurance that isn’t doing as much as he’d like it to. He takes the flashlight beside it as well.

The air is cold, the snow crunches beneath his boots. There are one set of footprints leaving the alley, at least fifteen minutes old by the look of the snow trying its best to cover them. Small size - Leslie’s, most likely.

He keeps the gun to his side. “Sir?”

The wind howls in answer and his skin crawls in a way that has nothing to do with the chill. Alfred turns on the flashlight, raises the gun and unclicks the safety, keeping the flashlight pressed against the barrow so he has a decent sightline. It’s not perfect, and his drill sergeant is most likely weeping somewhere, but it gives him the best of both worlds.

There’s snow and dark corners and he sees nothing but brick for a moment as he steps forward. It takes him a moment to notice the red.

It takes him a moment to notice the blood.

His elbows lock almost automatically - he doesn’t drop the gun, but his feet won’t move all the same. The snow’s no more than a thin layer near the entrance and fades further down the alley, so the damage isn’t obvious after a few feet. The flashlight’s beam falls on Thomas first, face turned away, sweater ripped from hip to shoulder and the skin discoloured with the fat and muscle exposed under torn flesh.

Martha’s twisted form is further in, a boot heel almost touching Thomas’ ankle, stomach down and her grey wool coat torn to shreds in a struggle, her back partially caved in like something had pressed down too hard where it shouldn’t have. Her hands are clawed, reaching away, into the dark. Her blonde hair is stained and some of it’s missing.

_She fought_ , thinks the part of Alfred’s brain that isn’t screaming, screaming like there’s no tomorrow. _She saw it first and she tried to protect, she tried to fight-_

But whatever had done this had been no match and it's with that thought that Alfred’s hands fall, the light shaking too hard to get a good look at anything.

But he can still see Bruce. He’s afraid to look, because he’s been there since Martha was complaining of morning sickness and Thomas was too tired from midnight shifts to feed a squalling newborn, and since this sweet child had taken his first steps down the halls of Wayne Manor, and he doesn’t know if he can look.

But he does and it breaks his heart. Bruce is so small, close enough to Thomas that he was almost hidden from Alfred’s angle, laid on his back like an angel, eyes closed, no blood anywhere but for his face. There’s no wounds like his parents, no torn clothes and for that Alfred sobs in relief, staggering forward and around, falling to his knees beside Bruce and Thomas’ heads.

Thomas’ face is clear of blood, but his throat is beyond destroyed, the spine almost exposed along the outer edge and there’s a lot of red pooled around him. Alfred’s never seen an injury like that, but he knows it couldn’t have taken long. He had to have died quickly.

But Bruce. He doesn’t know about Bruce. He presses a shaking hand to cooling black hair and feels nothing. There’s no heartbeat, no lungs gasping for air. No blood bubbling at the nose, eyes twitching or _anything_. He’s still warm - barely, but enough that it clearly wasn’t long and Alfred’s fingers come away wet anyway.

There’s blood in Bruce’s mouth and in his nose and there’s a hole in his throat too - not a big one, but it’s there, deep enough to expose the windpipe. Something killed him, but it did it more quickly than either of those signs could indicate.

His vision is blurring - tears or terror, he isn’t sure. He sucks in a shaking breath, another when he doesn’t feel it. Tries for a third and sobs instead.

The head beneath his hand jerks.

His fingers tighten on the gun on instinct, but his other hand is frozen to Bruce’s forehead, so he feels the second spasm course from head to foot like a live wire running through a loose-limbed doll.

He pulls his hand away with words of denial on his lips but the third and fourth spasms seal any noise in his mouth. The fifth and sixth and maybe the seventh too can barely be told apart as the small body before him shivers and then arches, spine curling out, limbs jerking in bone-jarring directions and then his mouth opens in a noiseless gasp, eyes flying open to stare backwards to Alfred.

Alfred is a soldier, Alfred is a butler. Alfred is the second father Bruce was lucky enough to have and he can’t even move enough to draw in air. One jerk may be a dying brain looping through its last commands, but he’s never seen anything like this.

Bruce’s eyes are black - nothing but sheer, absolute black without a hint of colour.

Bruce falls back after a second, hitting the ground with a thud, and for a moment he seems to choke on nothing, the hole in his throat whistling faintly as his mouth gasps for air.

And then he screams.

But it’s no scream Alfred’s ever heard before. It’s gutted painful and so loud his ears are ringing before it’s even finished. It’s feral and dangerous and something very deep inside him wants to run on principle, even if Alfred’s never been a running man.

“Bruce,” he chokes, so frightened and unsure, because maybe he was mistaken, maybe _this_ is the young heir’s death, maybe he was still _alive_ before.

But he knows deep down that isn’t true, which makes the croaked, barely there whisper of _“Alfred”_ all that more painful.

* * *

Bruce’s body is mostly clean of blood, so Alfred cradles the boy to his chest and hides his face, hoping the blood on both their hands will be overlooked. He can’t move, he can’t think, he can only wait until someone shows up.

When someone does, it’s two beat cops that responded to a nearby neighbor’s call and it’s clear from the looks on their faces that this is not something they usually deal with. One radios for backup by the squad car while the second stands frozen at the alley’s mouth.

“Is he okay?” she asks, eyes locked on the bodies splayed before her and Alfred tells her yes. Bruce is fine. Bruce is just in shock. Bruce is scared but not hurt.

Bruce is still held to his chest, drawing in whistling breaths so slowly and painfully that Alfred’s lungs hurt just to hear it. But it’s clear, at least at a glance, that he’s still alive. He’s moving and breathing and one hand has reached up and latched onto the lapels of Alfred’s coat, flaking blood hidden in the dark wool.

He’s still shivering, the spasms so light that it just looks like fear and he is _so cold_ , even with Alfred to leech heat from. There’s something about him that doesn’t feel quite right - a texture of his skin, the feeling of his body or the way he’s moving, perhaps - and his breathing is off, ever so slightly, but it’s better than dead.

It’s better than dead.

“I have to take him home,” Alfred says, and he doesn’t take no for an answer. Two people are dead and by all means he’s a suspect, but Bruce is still trying to whisper his name with half a throat and he _has to take Bruce home_.

The cops don’t even make him bribe them. She takes the manor’s number and he leaves as the second squad car pulls up. Gotham may be brutal, but it isn’t heartless and nobody deserves to see their parents’ murdered corpses. They offer him that mercy at least, even if he’ll have to pay for it later.

Bruce almost doesn’t let go when he gets to the car, which is why Alfred puts him into the passenger seat beside him so he can keep an eye on the child. Bruce is freezing cold now and his lungs are still breathing way too slowly.

There’s no fresh blood either. What’s on his face has started to dry, but nothing new has come up, not even to drip from his nose. There’s a _hole_ in his throat, but when Alfred checks it again as he buckles the boy in, the edges are _black_ and there’s no bleeding.

He places a hand near the wound, feels the muscles contract beneath the discoloured skin and almost chokes on air himself when he realizes the hole is smaller than it was before.

The edges aren’t actually black - the gap seems to be filling with dark flesh instead, like a bad patch job. The whistle of air passing through seems to be fading as it seals and Alfred looks away before he sees something move or change.

His fingers are still against Bruce’s neck though, so he feels for a pulse and doesn’t find one. He runs a hand through crusted, damp hair and whispers “ _we’re going home,”_ to Bruce’s confused mutters and tries again for a heartbeat in a different spot.

His skin is stone cold and feels _off_ , like weak rubber or wet sand under the water. There’s no flutter of a heart, no movement of blood under the skin. His wrist, when Alfred takes it, jerks at the touch and his fingers curl, but there’s no pulse there either.

He pulls away slowly, the horrible feeling in his gut intensifying. “We’re going home now,” he  tells Bruce and watches the boy’s eyes close and his head roll back against the seat belt.

He’s alive.

He’s alive but he’s _not_.

Alfred makes the trip back to Wayne Manor in record time and he can barely think the whole way there. He’s heard stories - everyone has, or at least seen a half-decent movie - but he’s never met a person who believes any of it and he doubts he ever will.

If he hadn’t seen it himself, he thinks he wouldn’t believe it either. But Bruce was dead and now isn’t, and he is alive but also _isn’t_ , and Alfred wonders abruptly, just as he leaves the bridge to return to the mainland, that perhaps he should have checked Thomas and Martha.

The thought worries him all the way to the house and he notes the phone ringing as he carries Bruce in. He’s still not bleeding, his heart is still not beating but the hole in his throat is now sealed with a black mess that feels a bit like skin when he touches it gently. If it hurts, Bruce gives no indication.

He picks the hallway phone up after he’s put Bruce in his bedroom and the ringing starts a second time. He’s not even able to get his usual spiel out before someone from the Gotham City Police Department introduces themselves. They’re calling on behalf of the beat cops that found them, the detectives now assigned to the case. They want to know where Bruce is and if he remembers anything.

“I think he’s in shock,” says Alfred, “he’s barely said a word.” They don’t act like they believe him, but then again, “I’ll have to let him sleep it off and call the Wayne family lawyers in the morning.”

Unsurprisingly, they’re fine with that. Alfred tries not to think about all that Bruce has inherited. It’s a lot of money and a lot of responsibility and there’s the funeral to prepare and…

Alfred buries his face in his hand and draws in a ragged breath. Thomas had been his friend since they were children. Half his life, Alfred has been taking care of the gentle boy that would grow into a kind man and now he’s faced with the prospect of burying Thomas - his friend, his brother - barely six months after his thirtieth birthday.

Alfred is thirty-two and the only one left who knows a damn thing about how to deal with Bruce Wayne.

He isn’t sure he has it in him to deal with what’s happened. But he has to try.

* * *

The world, when it swims back into focus, is far too bright. It’s too loud and too close and it drags at him like he’s drowning in it.

Bruce coughs and feels like he’s pulling himself out of the ocean. His lungs don’t want to move like they should and the rest of him follows suits. He has to struggle to lift his hand and press it against his eyes.

Smells crowd against him and he feels dizzy at the wave of things he never even _noticed_ before flooding his senses, things he can’t even name in their foreignness, things that smell like ocean salt and snow-damp leaves, things too sharp and bitter to place but that he nearly chokes on all the same. His head is pounding and his mouth feels _weird_ and the rest of him just hurts. Everything just hurts.

He feels so weak. He feels so weak and there’s something in the back of his mind, like a broken thing demanding his attention. He thinks and he _knows_ that he remembers, but maybe if he just breathes in instead, the air tasting of dust, it won’t hurt him. Maybe if he doesn’t think about it, he won’t see-

_\- flashes of teeth and steel and flesh parting like butter underneath and too much weight, too much pain, too much of everything oh mother father help me help me -_

\- he doesn’t think about it. He peels his hand away from his face as he feels vibrations course through the floor and the bed beneath him. The scent that floods his nose is the sweetest he’s ever known and something in his throat, his chest, _aches_ for it. There’s a _thump-thump-thump_ that’s hurting his ears but he still manages to focus on Alfred, looking grave and shaky and miserable all around.

Alfred’s hands when they touch him are burning hot and his stomach feels like it’s twisting inside of him. “Bruce, are you feeling alright?”

Well, when you put it like that.

“Hurts,” he croaks, having to push his lungs to get enough air for it. “Ev-everythin-ing hh-hurts.” Everything feels like it’s burning, burning up like fire eating paper and he can’t get water.

Alfred’s expression looks twisted - bordering on horrified, but mostly it’s sad. “We’ll figure it out,” he mutters and that- that does not bode well. “Try to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Okay,” Bruce says, and lunges for Alfred’s throat.

He’s not as fast as he feels. Or maybe Alfred is expecting it, because Bruce slams into Alfred’s raised arms instead and is pinned to the bed by his elbows as Alfred pushes him back.

There’s a flash in his head - cold, cold hands snapping bones and holding him still enough to allow icy fangs to _rip_ and _take_ \- and he howls at the image, an unearthly sound that is mournful and scared all at once.

“We’ll figure this out,” Alfred gasps, his eyes closed and his arms trembling as he kneels over Bruce, keeping him down. “We’ll figure this out.”

Bruce doesn’t believe him.

* * *

The world, when it comes back, is faded and blurred. Everything is still too large, too heavy, too much, but Bruce thinks maybe he’s getting too weak to handle it, so it doesn’t press so painful now.

He’s been awake and asleep and awake again over and over. He doesn’t even know how many times he’s woken to see Alfred sitting beside the bed, pressing his forehead to the bookcase, standing by the window, gone all together.

He tries to move, but Alfred has wrapped the blankets around him tightly enough that he’s too weak to undo them, let alone get out of bed, and his arms have been bound with scarves and then pinned with what appears to be the heaviest paperweights Alfred could find. It doesn’t hurt, but he can’t really move unless he gets another burst of energy like before.

And it seems less and less likely the more times he wakes up. He’s not stupid - something saved him the first time, but that something is starting to fade and now he doesn’t have long.

He’s dying all over again and the thought makes his weakened lungs squeeze painfully, like they’re wrapped in lead and silver. He wants to cry, but the tears won’t come. He watches the world blacken out for a bit and welcomes the dulled senses, until something pulls him back again, as it has been doing for hours.

Alfred is still standing by the desk, like he was before, but he turns at Bruce’s pained cry, the man’s face drawn with stress. Alfred’s holding a cup of something in his hands and he looks like he’d prefer not to be at all.

There’s black spots in Bruce’s vision and the dawn light is dappling his bedroom floor. Somehow, he thought dying in his bed would be kinder than this.

“Bruce,” Alfred whispers, so tired, so old, even though he doesn’t have that many years, isn’t that exhausted, “I need you to drink this.”

Bruce isn’t sure if he can find it in himself to. The world aches against his skin but the intoxicating smell that’s been seeping into his bones for hours is so much stronger when Alfred tips his head up with one gentle hand and brings the mug forward.

The liquid, when it touches his mouth, is warm and almost metallic, but it's the richest thing he’s ever had, so good and pure and he drains the whole cup before he even stops to think about it.

Everything’s too faded for him to notice the red. Everything’s too painful for him to notice that his lungs stop so he can drink without needing to stop for air. Everything’s too sharp in his senses for him to notice the smell beneath his nose matches the one wafting from beneath Alfred’s skin.

He drinks until it’s gone and wails with a red mouth when it’s taken away. Alfred whispers for him to wait, even as his struggles renew as the cold is chased away. There’s a new cup after that and another after that, each colder, less fresh than the last, but it hardly matters.

He still wants more - he thinks he’s never wanted anything so much in his life and that he could drink forever, could feed forever. But Alfred looks so tired and the world still hurts, so he lets it be for now.

Bruce is eight years old and he died on November 12th of 1982.

On November 13th, he realizes he won’t ever die again.

* * *

Thomas and Martha Wayne are buried on November 15th, a Monday. Bruce stands under an overcast cold winter sun, dressed in black, sunglasses to hide his eyes, hands clasped in front of him to hide the shaking.

He doesn’t cry because he can’t any more. The wool scarf around his neck hides the scar and he’d fed that morning, enough to add a weak flush to his skin. He flinches when people touch his shoulder, but he is a child, an orphan, watching his parents be put into the ground, so they forgive him.

Martha had been born Jewish, though she’d never practiced as long as Bruce had remembered. The Kane family, her line, had been building synagogues and temples since before Gotham was founded, and they’re here to bury her as well. Most of them don’t like him and don’t bother to hide it, even now, the only son of the Jewish woman who married an atheist. Everything’s still too loud, so he hears them whisper about the lack of shiva, how long it took for her to be buried, how long it’s been since she went to temple.

He’s never gone to anything like that and he doesn’t know any of the words or prayers, but he sits all the same in the parlor as people express their sorrows to Alfred. He thinks maybe there’s supposed to be something with a candle, but the stories she told him won’t come when he tries to remember. He sits on a chair and grips the edges so hard he thinks something creaks or cracks. He sniffles, but no tears come.

He wants nothing more than to cry, but he _can’t_ , the same way his heart doesn’t beat anymore and the same way it hurts so much to breath. His lungs just _stop_ if he doesn’t think about it.

After a while, Kate Kane shows up, eyes almost as red as her hair. She’s his cousin, only a year or two older, the first daughter of his mother’s younger sister, his aunt. But Martha hadn’t gotten along with her family since she was thirteen, so he knows Kate only in passing. She sits with him all the same though, dragging her heels across the carpet and they both say nothing, but he thinks she gets it.

His aunt collects her after a while and Alfred comes for him even later, after everyone’s gone home. Bruce thinks about asking him if they should be doing something, but Alfred doesn’t say anything, so he lets himself be taken away. Mother wasn’t the type to bind herself to a religion anyway, so perhaps a shiva would just be another reminder of a life she hadn’t asked for.

And he’ll never get the chance to ask her now, because mother is gone, gone, dead and buried alongside his father and Bruce will never see them again. He hates being alone, but he’s a tiny bit glad, in a guilty, guilty place in his heart, that they aren’t alive to see what’s happened to him.

Because whatever this is… it’s nothing decent people should see.

* * *

He’s dead and he knows it.

His skin turns mottled, sickly white if he doesn’t feed regularly. The fat underneath it is too hard; there’s no soft give if he presses, no warmth if he’s touched. There is no heartbeat, no pulse. The injuries received from his attacker had been filled in and repaired with black. His lungs struggle to breath all the time and he sometimes finds himself ceasing to do so at all when he doesn’t need to talk or smell. He’s not faster, or stronger yet, but he thinks he will be soon - he’s cracked two glasses in the last day or two already just by holding them wrong.

Everything seems slow to change.

His senses are the worst. He can taste things he’s never tasted before, his fingers catch sensations he’s never felt before. If it’s in the house, he can hear it if he strains; the skittering of insects inside the walls and the beat of the staff’s hearts feels like it’s going to drive him mad, but he’s figuring out how to shut it out now. As long as he’s drawing in air, he can smell just about everything; every individual herb in Alfred’s supper from two floors and a wing down, the cleaner used to polish the wooden edges of the furniture, the different brand of shampoo the maid used a week ago.

His eyesight’s another matter entirely. He’s barely been able to look into the mirror, not wanting to see the colourless black his eyes have become. There’s nothing left of him in there anymore. But in the dark- in the dark, with nothing but a candle, the stars or the distant glow of the city to light the night, he can see as if it was noon. Colours are beautiful, if muted, details so sharp it’s like he’s seeing them under a microscope. He can pick out the individual veins of leaves on the tree, can see fish swimming underwater, can pick out the texture of paper.

When there’s light, he can barely see. It shines too brightly, blurs and obscures most details. If he dares to look outside during the day, he can barely see _anything_. It’s nothing but a hot, white mess.

No wonder there are legends about… his _kind_ not going out in the sun. He doesn’t either, now that he’s blinded when he does.

Not that he doesn’t test the stories though, a day or two after everything settles. He was weak and miserable and _alone_ , the last of his family and now, apparently, a monster.

He’d dithered until just before dawn, before crawling onto the roof and waited to see if the sun would kill him. It hadn’t, and he’d been back inside before Alfred would notice he had gone.

Bruce didn’t tell him he’d tried. It seemed like the wrong thing to do, in retrospect.

But he has a lot of time to think now. He doesn’t sleep anymore, doesn’t seem to get tired, though he suspects he would if he went more than a few days without blood. But Alfred doesn’t want to let that happen - not until he’s got a better grip on his cravings and impulses, at the very least. 

Bruce doesn’t know where he’s getting the blood - it’s not all Alfred’s - and he doesn’t ask. Perhaps there are blood banks willing to part with it, or Alfred’s buying it privately, but whatever the reason, Bruce starts most days with a cup or two of warmed up blood, trying his best to keep his new teeth in his gums. Bruce drinks and feels it flood his frazzled nerves, uses the power boost it gives him to struggle to control his senses, his feelings.

It’s easier than grieving and it’s not easy at all.

He tries his best not to slip up - he tries not to attack, tries to act _normal_.

But weeks turn to months, 1982 into 1983 and it slowly becomes clear that there’s less left of the Bruce Wayne from before then either of them thought.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaah, this took so long but I am so happy with it! Thank you to [RosemaryBagels](http://rosemarybagels.tumblr.com/) for being an awesome beta and picking away at the weak points.
> 
> This chapter covers Bruce's training - the Joker will be introduced in the next chapter. I apologize for the non-linear nature, this chapter primarily covers Bruce training with Ra's al Ghul, however contains flashbacks to Henri Ducard and David Cain, plus Alfred. The rest of the story will not be like this! It evens out towards the end and that's where we'll pick up next chapter.
> 
> **Warnings for:** some perv-iness towards Bruce when he's trapped in a kid's body and one non-explicit non-con/dub-con scene between Talia and Bruce (with an adult body) later (there's no relationship, but Talia's a Piece of Shit™).

Bruce meets Ra’s al Ghul on the slopes of a mountain he doesn’t know the name of in 1996. The cold seeps into his boots and fingers and the wind threatens to tear his coat’s hood from his head. It is a miserable day and neither of them really want to be there.

But like many grand stories, what either of them want is irrelevant.

Bruce has been dead nearly fourteen years and he hasn’t aged a day.

* * *

When Bruce had been young, still adjusting to a liquid diet, so to speak, he’d taken the blood Alfred gave him without hesitation. It hadn’t always been _Alfred’s_ blood, but it had been human blood none the less. And then a few months had turned to many years and it’d taken a toll on the both of them as they got older in their own ways.

Animal blood was no real substitute, but it kept Bruce going. It didn’t have all that his body needed but it had _enough_. It had enough to keep the guilt anyway, at the very least. He’d taken Alfred’s blood only rarely for a while, until he’d left Gotham behind in 1989 and after that there had been no one to give it freely at all.

Henri Ducard is his first teacher, another of Bruce’s kind who uses his strength, speed and immortally to assassinate people of interest. It’s said he can track a single human across the world and it’s Ducard that teaches Bruce about guilt, in his own way. 

It’s Ducard who teaches Bruce what little regard and guilt their kind have for their mortal kin. It’s Ducard who teaches Bruce how to put morals and guilt aside. It’s Ducard who teaches Bruce that if your mind is strong enough, you don’t need to feel guilty about your food at all. You can just _convince_ someone to give up what they can’t do without, to want to give up what they’d never want if they really knew. It’s Ducard that says that if your mind is sharp enough, you can overpower thought, reason, instinct and _take_ what you need.

Bruce had heard stories. Legends. Rumours. He could do one or two things himself already and he’d heard of more, just whispers but still very real. Mental control features in many tales and it’s no surprise that a man like Ducard can and will use it. 

Bruce learned moral and ethic and value from parents who’d learned it in a surgical theatre and while he understands _I will do no harm_ , that doesn’t mean sometimes a needed thing doesn’t _hurt_.

Bruce spends many months wishing he had something to throw up while he figures out how to stretch his mind and latch onto the targets Ducard hunts; terrorists and murderers, escaped convicts and powerful drug lords, anyone who Ducard is contracted against. It doesn’t take long to figure it out, the way energy ebbs and flows inside a person’s head and how easy it is to redirect.

Bruce would like to say he feels better that it’s only the awful who must undergo this before Ducard kills them, but he would be lying. Bruce would like to say he only does this so he can learn how to defeat it, but he would be lying.

Bruce would like to say he never feeds off the dead and the dying, after Ducard has struck, but that would be a lie too.

Bruce knows a lot about lying. Ducard taught him how to push the truth right into someone’s thoughts, but he didn’t teach Bruce that you should have only been able to do that to humans.

It isn’t until Ducard’s long gone, left in a Polish blood bar and Bruce has walked from there into the USSR just in time to see the Soviet Union fall in 1991, that Bruce realises he’s a lot more powerful then he should be.

* * *

Bruce was twelve - or as close to twelve as the dead could be - when he figured out he could do _things_ no human should be able to do.

He’d been fighting with Alfred, as they had been known to do the older Bruce got, and he had been so desperate to just be left alone. Bruce had found some obscure corner and hunkered down to bury his face in his knees and pretend he could cry.

He still remembers thinking so clearly to just _leave me alone, ignore me, go away_ and when Alfred had finally looked into the room for him, the butler's eyes had swept right over him like Bruce wasn’t even there.

That was the trick, you see. If Bruce tried hard enough, he could stand right in front of someone and they wouldn’t even know he was there. They may step aside so they wouldn’t run into him, they may avoid the area he was standing, but they couldn’t _see_ him. It wasn’t invisibility, it wasn’t even perfect, it was just anonymity.

But for a boy who hadn’t aged since 1982, who was ten and then twelve and then fourteen but still looked _eight_ , it was the best gift he could get. With the gift to pass unseen, he could go anywhere, hide anywhere.

He didn’t tell Alfred. Alfred would have stopped him, if he knew. And so Bruce ghosted out of the Manor in early 1989, fifteen years old and so alone, determined to find others of his kind, even if it killed him.

* * *

In all honesty, if Bruce could have have his pick of teachers from the few supernatural beings he’d met that could tolerate his presence, Henri Ducard would not have made the list. He was everything Bruce never wanted to be; a lustful killer with too much skill and too little imagination, burying himself in the flesh of the present to avoid the bloody future and forget the miserable past.

But Bruce had not had his pick of teachers and he’d left Gotham over half a year ago. He had received more scars in those months then he’d accumulated over two different lives and he knew less than he did before. So when he had met Ducard in Germany in November, 1989, both of them there to watch the Berlin Wall begin to fall, Bruce had left with him.

Ducard was loud, uncivil and far too violent for Bruce’s tastes, but he’d been dead since before D-Day by way of a battlefield frenzied Nazi and he knew things Bruce could never find in a book. Things Bruce _wanted_ to know.

So he put up with the Parisian assassin until he learned them.

* * *

There are many strange things concerning Ra’s al Ghul.

He was not _dead_ , for starters. Centuries old, sure, but very much still alive and well. Bruce has met several people who couldn’t die, even to start, but Ra’s has no powers, no heritage, no nothing. He ages, he bleeds, he weakens, but something he does means that this doesn’t _matter_.

Ra’s al Ghul has been alive for almost eight hundred years. If anyone knows how he does it, they aren’t telling Bruce.

And if Ra’s had not have such a reputation of being endlessly invested in _knowledge_ and science and the beautiful, unknown things of this world, Bruce would honestly have been too concerned to go near him. It’s no secret that many speak his name in whispers, fearing his armies or assassins or disciples, depending upon who you talk to. But if you dig a bit deeper - in the fragments of stories people tell - it becomes clear that what Ra’s wants to do more than anything is learn and preserve.

He teaches very few. Most who go to the templates go to learn how to fight, though what they fight, nobody seems to know. But they rarely study under Ra’s; it’s always a former student of a former student or _something_ like that. They say if you can impress him, he may even speak to you, but very few have ever succeed.

David Cain, Bruce’s second teacher, was the last student of Ra’s himself, over a century ago when he was human and alive. Bruce hears rumours that Cain sought the turning, the bite because he wished to live forever like his teacher and that Ra’s shunned him for it. As far as he can tell, Ra’s has never _taught_ one of Bruce’s kind, not directly.

But Bruce is, above all else, very, very clever. He puts his ear to the ground and sniffs out rumours and finds tale of a forgotten manuscript buried in some cave somewhere no one can really remember. Cain is busy tracking some wanted thief across most of India and while Bruce could help - the clues are all too obvious to _him_ \- he chooses instead to hunt the book, agreeing to meet Cain back in China.

It takes him a bit longer than he thought - and Cain’s target is harder to find than the old assassin wants to believe - but he still makes the rendezvous on a mountain he doesn’t know the name of.

He’d known about Ra’s for a while - and that Ra’s al Ghul had been the contractor for Cain’s elusive thief as well - so the appearance is no surprise. He meets Cain on a mountain with a four-hundred year old book wrapped as carefully as he can manage and presents it to Ra’s when Cain presents the thief’s head.

Cain had been a fool, over a century ago when he’d chosen death and immortality over life and it’s clear when Bruce shows up with his gift that Cain knows very little about his old teacher even now. Cain expects Ra’s to reject it - what show of strength is leather and paper, after all?

But Bruce knows people like Ra’s. They may seek power to protect themselves or others or even an _idea_.

But there is nothing more precious to them than the truth.

Bruce should know; he’s one of those people.

* * *

The first time Bruce speaks to Alfred, after leaving Gotham with only a letter as a goodbye, he’s in Austria and has put what few schilling coins he has into a payphone to call across the Atlantic Ocean.

One hand is holding the shaking receiver to his ear, trying his best to keep his voice calm and leveled, even though he isn’t sure he’s hiding well enough to keep someone from investigating even if they couldn’t _see_ anything. The other hand is pressed to an oozing bite wound on his raised arm, just below his wrist, black fluid mixed with a hint of lunch’s blood dripping down his skin and over his fingers.

He’ll meet Henri Ducard in less than two months.

Alfred’s voice, when he answers, is so worn and tired and Bruce can barely get his voice to respond enough to say hello. But he manages it and Alfred-

Bruce has dim memories of a mother who was spitfire and rage, wrapped in passion and affection, a woman who had been _angry_ for so much of her life but try as he might, he cannot recall what his mother’s voice had sounded like when it shouted.

But he’ll never forget the fury Alfred spits at him. He can’t, because he’s been longing to hear a familiar voice for months now but Alfred is beyond furious with him, beyond despair at what Bruce has done.

“How could you do this to me?” Alfred sounds so lost, like a ship unmoored and adrift. “How could you do this?”

“I did this for _me_ ,” Bruce tries to explain, but in the end, he can’t find the words and he hangs up the phone when Alfred won’t listen.

He spends a week hunting every wild animal he can find to replace the blood he used to heal and then runs amok some vicious supernatural creature outside of Kapfenburg and has to spend almost a month running and healing from that. He crosses the German border in October of 1989.

* * *

There are quite a few people like him at Ra’s al Ghul’s temple, more than he expected. Some have been dead for decades, centuries even, while others are still coming down from their initial turning frenzy. There are a great many humans, ordinary mortals and witches and people who can do things there are no names for. Other beings too - he’s pretty sure his barrack captain is a _werewolf_ \- but nothing that Bruce hasn’t seen before.

He’s seen a lot of things in his travels - he’s been gone over seven years now, after all. He’s twenty two in a body that hasn’t aged since he was eight years old and lying on snow-covered pavement. He’s trained with two assassins, his own kind; the immortal undead with a craving for blood and nothing else.

(He knows there are names for those type of monsters, but he can’t bring himself to say them. It feels like the final nail in a coffin he’s been resisting for near fifteen years now and he’s nothing if not stubborn.)

Strangely enough, the people here had _heard of him_.

Nothing more than whispers, mostly. There weren’t _that_ many like him left these days, so word got around when a new one appeared. And he had known in his travels that people - especially the _dead ones_ \- didn’t appreciate him showing up for a chat. Apparently it was rare for someone to travel so much, to talk to so many, to train under not one, but two who were not their own sire.

They wondered of his motives and he could feel equal parts amusement and fear in their minds, rippling around him like a stone thrown in a pond. They were curious and nosey and all too obvious in their intentions.

Ra’s al Ghul had brought him here to train with the others. Bruce had caught the grand master’s attention. Bruce was a _danger_ to those trying to draw that ancient gaze.

And while Ra’s had not spoken to him since the mountain, not a day went by when Bruce did not feel the thundering hot mind of Ra’s focus on him, somewhere just out of sight. It was a like a sandstorm contained in bone and all Bruce had to do was strike down the rod to catch the lightning.

He had to do something _spectacular_.

Fortunately, he had learned dramatics from his mother.

* * *

The first thing Henri Ducards teaches him is what a sire is.

Bruce has heard the term before, but Ducard is the first one to explain it to him, after the sun had come up one winter morning and they’re waiting it out in a darkened hotel room.

“A sire,” Ducard had said, offering Bruce what appeared to be a used plastic water bottle full of blood, “is the bastard who bit and turned you, plain and simple.”

The blood hadn’t taste that great - stressed, like whoever it had come from did not want to give it - and it was cold from being stored on ice, but it was _human blood_ , the first Bruce had tasted since he had left Gotham.

“I have a feeling it's not actually that simple,” Bruce had replied, draining a good quarter of the bottle and trying not to left his fear of being trapped with another show. It had been a rough couple of months, and it turned out his kind were mostly solitary creatures wanting to keep it that way.

“No,” Ducard had admitted, “it’s not. You are bound to your sire, until such time as he or she has turned to dust. A sire can call all their children to them with only a sound, can control them all with a thought, if that sire is powerful enough. I’ve heard of some children that can break the hold… but for those of us with an existing sire, we are never free.”

Bruce thought of death and ash, pressing down and suffocating him for the last time. “What happens if you don’t know who your sire is?”

Ducard eyed him with a neutral expression, “if you don’t know who your sire is… they are either toying with you, or they don’t know they created a vampire.”

Bruce flinched at that last word - as he had every time he’d ever heard it - but agreed. “That’s what I thought.”

“You should consider yourself lucky, if that’s the case,” Ducard looked thoughtful. “You can do a lot with freedom like that.”

* * *

Paris was not as beautiful as the stories said it was, but he supposed it doesn’t matter. Ducard had taken Bruce under his wing, teaching him the varied skills he’d amassed over decades as they traveled across Europe. Paris was where Ducard was based out of, where he lived between contracts and his penthouse was at least a century old.

Ducard was lonely, that was blatantly obvious. He talked, even if Bruce wasn’t paying attention or nearby and he seemed eager to surround himself in distractions. As days turned to weeks, Bruce found himself frequenting bars and clubs - some human, some _not_ \- watching as Ducard buried himself in other people.

It was in a dusty basement that Ducard taught him the fine points of how he could make people do things. Ducard didn’t even bother trying to woo or entice the women he fed on between missions; he would just drop a line of desire into weaker minds, drawing them in like a fish on a line and making them _want_ to come to him.

A mind with a line on it was easy to feed on and Ducard _liked_ easy things.

Bruce didn’t take up the offers to feed on the living - if he drank human blood, it was already harvested. It was easy enough to get access to it in the supernatural gathering spots Ducard frequented. And there was a difference, it turned out, between feeding on what was still part of a person, and what had been taken from them.

Blood that was still connected to a person had an energy, an essence that seemed to affect those that drank it. Some acted drunk, some seemed to almost sleep, others were almost frenzied from it.

Ducard was almost drugged after feeding, prone to mumbling and speaking about things that he would not otherwise say, if given the option.

Bruce was no fool - nobody was his friend out here and everything was an advantage. Ducard didn’t always realize the things he was saying and even his kind was prone to falling to suggestions, if you were strong enough. It was so easy for Bruce to just push _don’t think about me… don’t think about what you’re saying…_

Oh, the secrets Ducard had.

* * *

Do you want to know one of them?

Henri Ducard feared many things, but he feared a man named Ra’s al Ghul the most. Ra’s was said to have toppled and saved empires, written the books on torture and medicine, taught both terrible killers and magnificent heros. It was said he could kill the already dead without any of the usual tricks, could read his opponents thoughts, could survive any wound and yet he _bled_. Ra’s commanded an army across the entire world and it was said that he had power over even Bruce’s kind, who were _supposed_ to be the strongest.

It was said that Ra’s could do many things. Raise the dead. Kill the living with a flick of his fingers. Heal any disease or injury and make you young again too.

Make you older even, if you had died too small to grow.

Bruce was no fool. It may have been a story, but all legends came from some form of truth.

He just had to find _what_ truth.

* * *

At the temple, Bruce is careful, delicate in his misdirections. The other students here - the League, of shadows or assassins or demons, depending upon who you asked - are their own brand of vicious and they weren’t keen for him to upstage them. He had to be subtle, show how his small body struggled liked it defined him and win when they went for the kill.

He learned quickly, very quickly. Even when he was half the size of the adults easy, it was not hard to adapt what he could to his own body. Speed and cleverness was the key. 

And he could feel Ra’s paying attention. Bruce tries not to push at that powerful mind - he wasn’t sure yet, but he thought it was possible that a strong mind could pick up when he paid too much attention. If it were possible, Ra’s would be the one to manage it. 

Like all hunters - for surely that’s what he is, in instinct, and now in training - he waits until he’s sure his prey is ready. Ra’s is patient, curious - he wants to know that Bruce can _learn_ , before he offers anything else. So Bruce waits, and waits, and _waits_.

He waits until his peers begin to grow angry, until Ra’s interest begins to peak. This will be a fight that will make or break him and Ra’s knows it.

It’s another of Bruce’s kind, that comes for him in the end. Dead for a century or two easy, an excellent fighter, fairly strong-willed - strong enough to be the go-to introduction instructor for the mental powers their kind has. He’s been with the League a long time - long enough to gain a reputation, but he doesn’t stand apart from the countless others like him. He is a man who undeniably believes he should have Ra’s personal attention when he never will.

Bruce is not surprised this one is who everyone backs. He _is_ strong, and a good fighter, but clearly not smart enough to realize Bruce is hiding something.

When the man comes, striding glorious across the hot, Arabian sand with both his swords drawn, Bruce doesn’t even draw his.

He stands, he waits - a child against a tidal wave. He stands and he meets his challenger’s eyes. Ra’s is a burning presence at the back of Bruce’s mind, closer than he usually is and judging by the whispers, he’s close enough for people to see the grand master. Ra’s al Ghul has come as a witness.

“American,” the man snarls, one curved blade pointed for Bruce’s heart, “I challenge you to armed combat. Raise your weapon.”

“I decline,” Bruce replies, voice clear and carrying. “I would hate for you to disgrace yourself more than you already have.”

The ripple of minds around him are amused, nervous and excited. They want to see a bloodbath and they think Bruce’s challenger will provide one.

“Raise your weapon,” the man howls, deep and low, advancing towards Bruce.

“ ** _Lower yours_** ,” Bruce hisses in return, pushing everything he’s got into the suggestion.

The man freezes, like someone hit the pause button on a movie screen. Like someone had buried him in stone. The raised blade quivers in his hand, the tip circling slowly in the air.

“ ** _Drop your weapons_** ,” Bruce pushes, feeling the energy of life pulse. The challenger’s eyes flicker and for a moment seem to _lighten_ from the endless black.

The first sword by the man’s side shakes, slips and then falls to the sand. Bruce can’t even hear anyone speak and he can feel their horror begin to crawl through the crowd. They _know_ he shouldn’t be able to do that.

“ ** _Let it fall_** _,_ ” Bruce whispers, stepping forward ever so carefully, “ ** _it’s so heavy, isn’t it?_** ”

The second, outstretched sword drops, hits the sand with a dull thump. The man is still frozen stiff and his fingers are curled in the air, just loose enough for the hilt to have slipped through.

As Bruce watches, his eyes - those same totally black eyes without a hint of colour that everyone of their species has - begin to grey, becoming lighter and lighter as his body starts to loosen and relax. 

Bruce can feel this mind - this old mind with so much hate and anger - begin to unfold before him. Withering memories, stray thoughts, feelings and dreams and hopes and nightmares… they are all laid bare with Bruce to see.

He’s never put this much power into it before.

“I can make you do anything,” Bruce says, half surprised and half reassured. “I control you completely right now - don’t worry, I can feel your fears, I don’t intent to harm you. Unlike you- oh Yiorgos, the things you planned to do to me. The things you like to do. Maybe I should make you forget them all together. Maybe I should make you forget who _you_ are.”

The fear in Yiorgos’ mind is half sickening, half thrilling to witness. And Bruce can feel it - it would only take a small push to overwhelm Yiorgos completely and take control. His eyes are almost white, and Bruce has never seen _that_ before.

“But such a thing would be rude to do without asking. You are a _part_ of this temple...” Bruce muses, turning to look behind him. Standing on a balcony above the crowd, Ra’s silhouette cuts an impressive figure. “Perhaps our lord, the great Ra’s al Ghul, still has use for you?”

Above them all, Ra’s al Ghul smiles.

* * *

Ra’s invites him to dinner.

It makes Bruce feel unbelievably small, but he goes anyway.

Yiorgos has fled, but the cruel are usually cowards when they learn something can hit them. Bruce has seen everything that Yiorgos _is_ and honestly if they weren’t in the middle of a desert, he would scrub his skin raw in a spring or pool somewhere until those memories and thoughts have stopped coating his skin.

But the living need water here in this unliving, undying desert more than he does, so he settles for changing his robes to a spare and politely requesting a new set from the quartermaster without making it clear he would be burning the old one.

While he’s somewhat dubious of dinner - he hasn’t really _eaten_ anything in a very, very long time - Ra’s manages to make it not terribly awkward. There’s blood for Bruce as well, and he was raised on high society manners, so they manage to make small talk in a way that isn’t dreadfully boring for either of them. At least for a while.

“When did you realize you could control others of your kind?” Ra’s looks him directly in the eye when he asks, and it’s not nearly as condescending as Bruce is used to. An adult he may be, but it doesn’t _look_ like that to most and Ra’s manages to bypass it entirely.

“Not long after I was originally taught on humans.” Bruce keeps his hands still around his goblet, ignoring the scent of blood with long practice. “My first teacher was… somewhat unclear on instructions, and I had not met many of my kind before him. It didn’t occur to me not to try.”

The way Ra’s smiles at that - he understands, that’s clear. Most wouldn’t and haven’t when others have come up to question Bruce after his display. They think there’s got to be another trick to it, and maybe there is. Maybe it’s something they’re missing and Bruce isn’t.

But it could just be raw strength and exceptional willpower and Ra’s and Bruce know it. They both do things that way all the time.

“A skill like that should be honed,” Ra’s muses, his own dinner left untouched as he thinks about it, fork and knife held delicately like weapons. “It’s beyond rare, it would give you an untold advantage. Imagine what you could do with it.”

Bruce can imagine, but that’s not why he’s here. “You want to know how it works. How far I could push it.”

The gleam in Ra’s al Ghul’s eyes is unmistakable. He _wants_ to know every little thing that Bruce can do and have his limits precisely measured. The thought that Bruce is sitting here, an unknown in a world of knowns, is consuming him. But he’s not stupid. “No one can teach you this and anyone could teach you to fight. You want something, Bruce Wayne, what it is?”

The blood Bruce sips from is flat, not properly heated, not properly chilled, but it carries no stress, no fear that ruins his mouth. It’s still fresh enough that he can detect the hint of _life_ that it was drawn from. “I’ve heard stories of you. The things you can do.”

Ra’s says nothing, offers nothing.

“I’ve heard you can age the dead.”

* * *

If Bruce’s peers were unsure of him before, they were downright unfriendly now.

The good news is that none of them were eager to make another attempt against him.

The bad news is that they were now all _terrified_ of him.

His barrack roommates were just barely tolerating him so he ends up switching his feeding times around so he doesn’t spook other blood drinkers, who would rather go hungry than run into him in the kitchens. The only ones who don’t seem too frightened are the humans, who were already living with the reality that anyone could come along and take over their minds.

Those that aren’t scared of him are just downright jealous. Ra’s isn’t interested in outright training Bruce - it’s clear he can learn just as well from the tutors and classes he’s already got - but Bruce does start disappearing in Ra’s general direction in downtime hours. They’ve clearly got an agreement of some sort and that’s what half the people there _want_ like nothing else.

Bruce tries not to concern himself with it. It surely isn’t too important in the grand scheme of things.

Bruce has been at the temple for just over two months and now spends his daylight hours in Ra’s workshops and hidden rooms - places filled with ancient books, powerful artifacts and enough weaponry to kill almost anyone. Bruce has no need to sleep and so trains with other immortals during the night and the humans during the morning and evenings when it’s cool enough for them to fight without getting trapped in the noon heat.

He’s done his best to make it clear he plans to shorten his five years of training down to at most three. His teachers seem resigned to it and throw as many extra assignments and sessions on him as they can. Perhaps they’re hoping he will fail under too much work, or at least become too tired to be as dangerous as he can be.

But there’s no physical training with Ra’s - it’s all mental. They work first on learning the upper limits of Bruce’s mental powers and it turns out there’s a lot more there than Bruce expects him to find.

“You don’t have multiple powers,” Ra’s says one afternoon, when Bruce is still trying to wrap his own head around the fact that Ra’s has run him through fifteen different languages in the past two hours and Bruce can somehow understand them _all_ , without learning them. “I would say you really just have the one.”

“This is all _one thing_?” Bruce asks, pushing his own mind a little further to understand the dead dialect Ra’s switches to.

“It’s understanding,” Ra’s explains, his voice low and accented as he works through a language even he doesn’t seem to fully remember. “To hide, you alter others’ understanding of what they’re seeing. To control, you alter another’s understanding of what they’ll _do_. To know what someone’s saying in a language you’ve never heard before, you alter your _own_ understanding. You are tapping into life itself to understand the truth and lies of souls.”

“I’m not sure I want that,” Bruce whispers, so quiet he almost doesn’t intend for Ra’s to hear it.

“That’s why it's better off in your hands,” Ra’s reassures, with an odd kindness to his words.

* * *

One day Bruce is heading to meet Ra’s and almost runs right into a woman.

She stands in the gilded hallway like a queen, rich brown skin clad in gold silk, long black hair held in place with silver and jewels. When she smiles at him, it’s with an edge that speaks of death and life and amusement all at once and dark eyes that hide more secrets than even he can sense.

Bruce doesn’t understand a lot about beauty and attraction and all that goes with it - the side effect of a brain and a body that never went through puberty - but she is undoubtedly someone people would fall for in an instance, if they and he were so inclined.

“You must be my father’s latest student,” she says with a voice like the ocean and Bruce considers all the ways he can run from this.

* * *

Talia al Ghul is the most dangerous person Bruce has ever met. She keeps her mind guarded so much that _nothing_ is broadcasted and so Bruce knows naught but what she says. Sometimes it’s the truth, the things she says, but other things he can taste the lie on the air and he wonders what she’s hiding.

He has a feeling he should hope to never find out.

Her attention prickles down his neck in a way he can’t really avoid. Ra’s is fond of all his children and Talia - the oldest living at nearly _four hundred years_ \- is among his favourites. She sits in on many of their sessions and Bruce can’t help wanting to shake at the way her eyes watch him, like she’s planning something and he hasn’t got a say in whether or not he’s involved.

He’s got his own plans and Talia does not feature in them. She can’t and she won’t and when she lays a hand in his hair with a truth-laugh and a lie-smile, he can barely keep the shivers back. He can feel her bad intentions like an oily press against him, but he cannot complete his mission without Ra’s gift and so he endures and he does not speak of it.

Ra’s cannot know and neither can Talia.

* * *

It had been Ducard that had told him of all that he’s missing.

“Sex, with our kind, it’s all mental, you know. Can’t really get it up anymore anyway, no circulating blood and all that, but _man_ \- you gotta kinda connect like you’re about to enthrall someone but not and then they go over the edge and it brings you right along for the ride, it’s _fantastic_.”

Bruce had been sixteen and eight at the same time and also not particularly interested. “I don’t think it’ll really work with me looking this way.”

“I’m sure there are people who are interested in that,” Ducard had said with a smirk, and Bruce had not spoken to him for over a week until the burning need to throw the old assassin onto holy ground and leave him there had passed.

* * *

Ra’s gift is something called a Lazarus Pit and Bruce is shown it nearly six months after he comes to the temple. It’s buried deep beneath the temple, so far down it’s always cold no matter the heat of the sand above. The chamber is less of a room and more of a crack in the stone, from which a twisting green liquid pours into a roughly hewed basin.

This is what keeps Ra’s al Ghul alive and immortal and it’s going to do something amazing for Bruce too.

“You must never speak of this,” says Ra’s and Bruce has no trouble agreeing. If this works- if this works, he almost feels like he would do anything for it. Before the temple, he’d never really spent time with more than one or two people and its _agonizing_ , living out in the world where so many treat him so differently for something he can’t control.

He thinks he might almost do anything, to never be small again.

“It will hurt,” Ra’s says, voice barely above a murmur and eyes fixated on the green below them. “You might see things - visions, if you will. Don’t dwell on them, but don’t forget them either, if you can. You’ll be bound and we’ll pull you out once you’ve been in long enough. Do not try to get out quicker or stay in longer - this _cannot_ be reversed, not for you.”

“Thank you,” Bruce whispers, and honestly has nothing more to say. He isn’t even sure if he believes it, even though he’s here.

They wrap him in chains and drag him to the edge of the overhanging cliff. The whole cave is like a spiral inside a column - the entrance is over thirty feet above the hissing pool and there is a winding path around the wall to the bottom, with only a small ledge around the edges of the pool for people to stand on or drag themselves out to.

They intend to drop him down. Apparently, the shock takes away from the pain and he isn’t sure he’s looking forward to _that_.

But he accepts the chains, steps off the edge, makes the fall and hits the water without really making himself think about it anyway. It’s been so hot here that the cold alone almost shooks him right back out.

And then-

* * *

What Bruce sees in the pool, in the pit, more between life and death than he’s ever been, he cannot and will not ever describe.

It doesn’t last long - a couple of minutes maybe, but he feels only aware of a few seconds of that. The visions _do_ come for him and they consume most of the process until even the blinding pain fades.

He sees what will be and what could be and what won’t be and what might be and what could have been and almost was and never was and never will be and he thinks for a split second-

He thinks for a split second that he _cries_ , in a body with a beating heart and shuddering life and then it’s gone and they drag him up and over to the edge, let him drop on the rock beside the pit.

He howls like he’s dead and dying and alive all over again and wishes that he’d never been turned at all.

* * *

Bruce feels made anew. He’s had to relearn almost everything - he’d been fighting with a body two feet and a hundred and thirty pounds smaller, after all - but it feels so wonderful and he barely trips catching back up to everyone. They don’t really treat him different, because they still don’t like him, but a few respect him for getting that far with Ra’s at all and most of the people he shares a barrack with - not that he sleeps, but even the dead need to keep their stuff _somewhere_ \- have calmed down. They don't trust him and they probably never will, but if they weren’t ever going to, it’s no great loss.

He doesn't care. He doesn't intend to stay and he feels guilty at the thought - Ra’s has given him a magnification gift and once Bruce is done his training, he'll leave this all behind.

But when he tries to tell Ra’s this, the older man already knows.

“It was never your destiny to be here, my boy,” Ra’s says during a lunch break one day. “My only hope is that you will do that destiny well and we shall never have to cross swords.”

Bruce thinks of his city, beautiful and ugly all at once and smiles a bit sadly before it fades. “Gotham is the only home I will ever have. If we were to ever to disagree...”

If they were ever to turn against each other, it would be over Gotham.

* * *

Ra’s al Ghul has trained very few, all things considering. Almost eight hundred years he has spent drawing together his people and almost eight hundred years he has lived on the boiling hot sands under a murderous sun. Thousands have gone to the temple and Ra’s has taught twelve himself, until he had taught Bruce and that number had become thirteen.

When Bruce does leave, in March of 1999, Ra’s watches him go with an emotionless face and battle scarred hands clasped behind him. Many others are there to watch as well, but they only want to know if Ra’s will let him leave at all. Bruce has made no friends and there are none to bid Bruce farewell.

(He does not think of Talia, watching him leave from a distant balcony.)

Three years, ten years - Bruce has always carried little, but he goes with only the clothes he brought with him, his weapons, Ra’s’ gifts and a plane ticket to Gotham, New Jersey, USA from an airport so small it isn’t even named. He has nothing to give Ra’s and nothing to leave behind that will say what he’s thinking. He has no way of saying _I am sorry I am never coming back_ without hurting this man who has given him so much.

But Bruce pauses before the car that will take him to the airport. When he turns, he says nothing but he _reaches_ , far beyond what he’s reached before.

He reaches out with a mind that can kill but doesn’t and brushes it against the sandstorm that is Ra’s al Ghul’s mind. Only for a moment, a nearly insignificant second, but he’s never done it before, during all his years at the temple and he wants Ra’s to know he _hadn’t_.

For an impossible moment, the sandstorm pauses. It turns, like a whole ocean reserving the tide and all that Bruce _is_ can only stand and wait.

It’s only for a second and when Ra’s retreats, proud and fond but also _knowing_ , Bruce has to blink the spots from his vision. He gets in the car, doesn’t look back and thinks of the few people who have been _proud_ of him in his lonely life.

He does not know the future, but neither does Ra’s.

* * *

Talia is gone on some mission when Bruce goes into the Lazarus Pit and it takes a few months for her to come back. Bruce was worried about seeing her again, but as the weeks stretched, the anxiety starts the fade. He’s quickly learning how easy it so for an old, immortal mind to just forget how long time _is_.

He’s training alone in the early hours of the morning, before the sun’s come up to blind him, learning how his new body moves through the forms. It’s getting easier to push himself harder, faster than most bodies can go and he loves the feeling of cool, desert air twisting around him as he leaps above the sand.

He catches the scent of some human approaching, but they often do to watch and his instructors have informed him that anyone stupid enough to wander onto a sparring ground and get themselves hurt deserved it, so he doesn’t really pay attention to them.

She moves in when his back is turned and his blade is met with hers in a mirror of the form when he swings. It’s a surprise in its rudeness, but he doesn’t let it show on his face and instead slows himself down to match her speed and strength.

He knows few things about Talia al Ghul, but he knows she believes herself to be an equal match for even a non-human opponent. Bruce may not have the experience she does, but he can snap her bones with a squeeze of his hands and he has no desire to do _that_.

They fight for nearly an hour, until her body is dripping with sweat and the horizon is starting to get a little too bright for him. Talia smiles when he bows at the end and dips her head in acceptance but gives nothing in return for his respect.

“You were going easy on me,” she says with such an amused tone, as if she thinks he’s toying with her, as if she was humouring a child. “How chivalrous, Mr. Wayne.”

“It was just a cooldown session,” Bruce says and doesn’t move to follow when she shifts to go. “Didn’t really want to push it.”

“We should do it again,” Talia almost purrs, something heavy in her voice and dark in her eyes, “when we’re both fresh.”

He bows again and gives only a “my lady” as a response. When Talia walks away, she does it like she’s won.

* * *

She keeps close, as time slips on and Bruce finds himself cornered more than once. He watches the way she moves and talks and presses against him, hand curled possessively over his arm every time he’s within grabbing range.

He hears the way the others talk about her and women in general and he can’t _see it_. Not just her, but all the men and women at the temple. Perhaps his brain had spent too long too young, had aged but never matured and sure- his kind can’t exactly _give_ when it comes to relationships, but plenty of others seem to enjoy a mostly one-sided deal and the mental feedback they get from a thrall or a meal.

And while Talia clearly wants something from _him_ , he doesn’t want to give it. If she had been anyone else- anyone else but Lady Talia al Ghul, favourite daughter of Lord Ra’s al Ghul, he would have made that clear a long time ago.

But he _needs_ Ra’s and the knowledge the human has. And Bruce has already endured - he can endure again, and again, and _again_.

Anything, if it means he can go home.

* * *

For all that Talia unnerves him, she is not the worst he has endured.

1992 was probably the hardest.

He had left Ducard several months before, after a particularly brutal mission. He was now a better tracker than Ducard ever was by that point, and it was in Moscow while the Soviets crumbled that Bruce finally pushed his powers - if they could be called that - to the next step. It turned out, if he made his links more passive, more open, he could _sense_ things without making the full-on connection.

It had taken Bruce over a year before that - a long, painful year that mostly he spent meditating between missions with Ducard, trying to avoid having to talk to his teacher or hear what Ducard was saying to himself. But in Moscow, Bruce had figured out how to master it until he could walk by and pick up when someone was speaking the truth or lying, if they had good intentions or bad. He could pick up wordless fear, motiveless anger, directionless passion with only the slightest push. He had to focus to figure out which of the minds around him it was, had to focus to hear the memories and thoughts that went with it, but by mid 1992, he had a perfectly anonymous way of sensing if someone was going to be a danger to him.

It didn’t make the year easier and it became clearer as the heat rose that he was just making distractions.

Bruce busied himself by walking, figuring up scattering words of Kazakh to go with his Russian after he crossed the Kazakhstan border and some Mongolian not long after that. But the year dragged at him more than a year had in a long time.

It had been ten years. Ten years since he’d died on the pavement, ten years since he’d attended the worst funeral of his life. The closer he came to November, the worst it got.

He calls Alfred, weeping, not far over the border of China. He’s been traveling by himself for almost six months by that point and the loneliness… it isn’t ripping, like he thought it would be, but he can understand why Ducard had surrounded himself in people who didn’t matter to him but were there all the same.

It’s the first time in years they’ve had a conversation that hasn’t end in anger, and it helps somewhat.

But Bruce still spends November of 1992 in a cave, not feeding, not moving, letting the world consume and forget him.

He only drags himself away from starvation when a hiker gets stranded nearby in the snow and needs to be saved. The blood frenzy from open wounds almost drives him mad and he screams to ice-covered mountains about the symmetry afterwards.

He doesn’t understand how someone can grieve this much and be expected to move on.

* * *

Perhaps that’s what rubs Bruce the wrong way above Talia. He isn’t entirely sure, but the more he watches her - as 1996 turns into 1997 and Bruce completes his first year of training - the more likely it seems.

He doesn’t think Talia _cares_. Not the same way most people do. She has her concerns, her ambitions, her fears, but if the world burned and everyone went with it, Talia would not care, as long as her own plans could go on unharmed.

The thought of someone caring that little is more terrifying than Talia could ever be. 

* * *

Bruce had found David Cain in a river-coarsed valley. Everything Ducard was Cain wasn’t, but they shared plenty in common.

Cain was an assassin too, no doubt about it - but he didn’t take every contract that came his way. He was had his own sense of morals, in a way that had clearly evolved over a very long time without much contact with mortals and only a dim memory of what they were suppose to be like.

But before he was anything else, Cain was a teacher. He trained humans and others, in many types of martial arts, supernatural skills and other useful things. Bruce had heard of him before, but it wasn’t until 1994, when he was twenty, that he finally tracked Cain down.

It is from Cain that Bruce learns the basics of fighting, the skills needed to teach others, and shadow walking.

Bruce has seen others of his kind - their kind - shadow walk before. One moment they were there… the next they had disappeared in a whisp of smoke. He’d been meaning to learn it for a while, but his own attempts had all been unsuccessful and it seemed like the sort of skill you didn’t want to get _wrong_.

Cain teaches him though, because Cain may be set in his ways and rules but the old assassin knew a troublemaker when he saw one and said it was best Bruce learned from him.

It takes time to find the little trick inside of him that does it. Cain describes it like many things, but Bruce, for the rest of his days and to all his own students, will always describe it like stream.

To walk from one shadow to another - to teleport, to disappear - is to take what blood is inside of you and burn a part of it in a power surge, to turn it to steam and smoke and _shadow_ , then walk straight through it to emerge in darkness somewhere else.

It is to destroy what you _need_ , to live another day.

Bruce thinks Cain tells him you can only go so far with it, but Bruce stores the thought. One day, when he has access to enough blood, he’ll see how far he can go.

He’d like to see if he could cross an ocean.

* * *

For a long time, there is no differentiating between the days at the temple. It’s not on purpose, but Bruce is so used to _moving_ and the temple hasn’t changed in centuries. People come and go and Bruce attends his sessions and lessons and strikes up a few tentative acquaintances with those who want to learn under _him_ , of all things.

Eventually, Ra’s orders him on missions for the League in the early autumn of 1997, over a year and a half since Bruce had arrived. These, at the very least, are exciting. They take Bruce all over the world, to recover artifacts and recruit talent and stop someone from coming to or falling from power.

Bruce notes the lack of missions that end with dead bodies and does his best to thank Ra’s for the consideration.

Ra’s seems to be the type to not push someone beyond their limits and that’s one line Bruce doesn’t think he can cross, even if it’ll kill him in the end.

* * *

Bruce trains.

In his own practice he learns how to control someone like a puppet, to read an opponent like breathing, to shadow walk right into the middle of a battlefield and capture a leading commander. From Ra’s he learns tactics and strategy, the history that’s never been written down, the life Bruce will lead one day, when the decades have turned to centuries.

Bruce runs his missions and he takes his classes and teaches his sessions and thinks _nothing_ of how much this hurts to go through. So far from Gotham. So far from what family he has left. 1997 turns to early 1998 and he grits his teeth through the feeling of New Jersey pulling him like hooks in his dead heart from across a world.

* * *

He’s careful not to get attached, to Ra’s and the temple and the League. He learns many things, some of which he knows and some of which he doesn’t.

Territories are a part of this. His kind - well, not just _his_ kind, but many other species as well - can do it. Bind their blood, poison and soul to a land and a people and hold it, use it, feed from it. It’s easy to set up, hard to maintain, difficult to sustain. It’ll kill you, if you’re not careful, so Bruce is very careful. He’s mentally stronger than most and even if he’s not _trying-_

He’s seen those that have accidently taken ahold of territories they couldn’t shake and were forever bound to it and all that lived there. He doesn’t want to tie himself to this place, even informally.

“You can’t take all of Gotham,” Ra’s says, one rare evening off, as they watch the stars from Ra’s study, “holding that many souls, that much land - sure, your people can capture small armies for a moment, hold entire estates, maybe a whole village, but a _city_? It’s never been done. It can’t be done.”

Bruce says nothing. Ra’s is used to that.

“You’ll kill yourself trying,” Ra’s bites and sips his tea.

“But I have to try,” Bruce replies.

* * *

Talia becomes aggressive, desperate, as his remaining time slips away. She still _wants_ , wants something from him but he can’t see it and doesn’t dare even brush her mind. Ra’s can sense when he’s even just _open_ and he has no doubt she can as well.

She makes her attempt in the unusually hot autumn of 1998. He goes to her quarters to deliver a report and finds her nude in the warm evening air.

The scent in the air - it’s in her blood, but also her skin and breath and even though he doesn’t _like_ her, it still smells so good and he finds himself drawn in.

He hadn’t even considered how little she has broadcasted before until she’s teasing his open mind with images and desires and emotions he’s never felt and his lungs stutter at the touch, cease moving all together as the rest of him just locks in place.

She pushes so hard - it doesn’t _overwhelm_ how he knows it should, like the attempts others have made at controlling him, but it’s so foreign and so intense and he’s never known touch like this.

She pushes him back, down, still. Doesn’t expect anything from a body that won’t respond but keeps her edges of her mind open for him to breath in and get lost in. Her movements are for her alone and the scent’s so strong the newest of the smell catches him as much as everything else.

He doesn’t realize how fuzzy the world’s getting until her mind starts to peak and drag him along. He fights it, as he realizes she must be doing _something_ , that this has a _purpose_ , but it’s too late and the edge, when it comes-

When she finishes, supernova just above the horizon, he can barely remember it. He had been expecting a human mind, but Talia fought like something _more_ and he hadn’t gotten his own mind out before the final blow had been struck.

He knows he loses time. He can’t sleep, but it feels a lot like it. Everything’s too bright, even in the dark and so nice and so painful all at once and when he wakes up- he doesn’t sleep, but he wakes up, Talia is gone.

He smells too much like her and he isn’t sure how he’s suppose to feel, because everyone says you’re supposed to like it and something in him had perhaps liked it as well. And even with that final burst of attraction from her, he had felt the barely there shimmering anger, hidden underneath it all.

He’d messed with her plans, by leaving. And she’d done _something_ to correct that plan.

But he doesn’t know _what_ and her smile afterwards is not telling in the slightest.

He does wonder though - he could have sworn the sealing, black taint-dripping gash in his side from practice had been a lot smaller before he went to her room. Perhaps moving around had torn it open again.

What good would sealant and skin do her anyway?

* * *

After Talia does- does whatever she does, Bruce stops laying his mind so open. He knows he has secondary defenses - that he was unprepared and now he isn’t, so he’ll fare better if it happens again. But he can’t stand even the thought of feeling her again like that, and so he blocks it off.

Nobody notices, not even Ra’s and he convinces himself that nobody would care if he spoke of it except to mock him.

* * *

In the last phone call Bruce had placed to Alfred, he had mentioned it might be a while - months or years, even - before they would be able to speak again. He had told Alfred as much as he dared; that there was a grand master Bruce was hoping to train under, but the school was remote and not prone to vacation breaks. Alfred wasn’t too pleased, but he never was.

It meant that he had no way to tell Alfred what Ra’s had done to him, this new body gifted to him. And sure, Bruce went on missions and he could have crept away to place a call, but the longer it was, the harder the thought got.

It was late 1998, near the end of his training, that Bruce realized it had been over two years, nearly three, since he had heard Alfred’s voice. He was due to finish in late February, only weeks after his twenty-fifth birthday and if all went well, he would be landing on Gotham’s shore for the first time in a decade come March.

He could have figured out a way to tell Alfred, but he didn’t.

* * *

Ra’s still tries to find a way to convince him to stay, when the end nears.

Bruce is expecting it, but it doesn’t make it any more difficult.

“Most people who learn under me train for _decades_ ,” Ra’s looks like he can’t decide between whether or not to be angry or sad that Bruce won’t listen. “You’ve completed a five year training session in three years and you think you’re _done_?”

“Nobody’s ever done learning,” Bruce says, because it’s exactly the sort of thing Ra’s would say. “But I’ve already waited almost twenty years to do something for my city. I have the rest of history to train - those people, my friends, my family, my people, their lifespans _are_ measured in decades. I want to make a difference to the ones still there.”

The look Ra’s gives him - it’s painful to look at and painful to have but Bruce knows Ra’s understands, even if he doesn’t _understand_.

“Gotham will always be yours, won’t it?” Ra’s sighs, sooths old hands over robes. “I was like you once, you know, so bound by my past.”

“We all are, my lord,” Bruce smiles, just a little bit. “Even if we’ve forgotten it.”

* * *

Coming home to Gotham is like stepping back in time.

Nothing’s really changed since it was 1982 and his heart was still beating. The lights are brighter and there are more people, but it’s still the same miserable, scarred city that it’s always been. The skyline may have changed but the smells haven’t and even though the airport is on the coast outside the city like the Manor, and not on the islands’ themselves, Bruce takes the long way home through the streets.

The taxi smells like enough despair to kill a small elephant but he still rolls the car window down as far as he can and breathes in the air like it’s the best thing ever put before him. He can feel it, all these souls in his mind’s eyes, rippling and twisting in their own dances, so beautiful and bright. 

He wants to take every single one of them and keep them safe. Gotham is _his_ and what’s his should be protected. Even if it’ll kill him, one day, even if they don’t want it.

There is viciousness and cruelty here but he is a hunter and a Wayne.

He can’t be anything less than what he is.

* * *

Bruce hesitates, at the Manor. He hadn’t told Alfred he was coming back, even if Alfred would have believed his older voice. It’s late evening - the sun’s been down a little over an hour and Bruce can see lights on in the Manor.

He stands for far too long in the door, and in the end can’t bring himself to ring the doorbell. He shadow walks through the walls instead and into the entrance hall, putting his bags down on a carpet that still smells like _home_.

Bruce hadn’t had enough of a grip on his powers to feel Alfred’s mind before he left but he can feel it now, a strong presence like a towering oak swaying peacefully in the breeze. Bruce is already in there, so it’s easy enough to give a little nudge… surely Alfred can feel he’s not alone right now. Perhaps Alfred should check the house.

Bruce feels guilty as soon as he does it and retreats before he can pick up too much. His hands pull at the leather wraps around his wrists and he can’t even stop his feet from fidgeting against the carpet. If his teachers could see him now, surely they would scold him for such a terrible habit.

The floor vibrates as Alfred approaches, the sound not even a sound until he’s close enough for Bruce to hear his feet on the floor and then the sound of the older man’s breathing.

Bruce can’t look. It’s been _ten years_ since he’s seen Alfred face to face and almost three years since he’s heard his caretaker’s voice.

“Excuse me, sir, can I help you?” Alfred’s voice is sharply edged with clear accusation. “This is _private_ property.”

Bruce hasn’t had a drink of water in nearly twenty years but he’s somehow sure his mouth has never been this dry. For a moment, he considers disappearing, making a leap somewhere. Never coming back.

“Hello Alfred,” Bruce says as he turns around, “I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead.”

The look on Alfred’s face - it’s confusion that bleeds into some type of horrified realization as he sees Bruce’s face. He doesn’t _say_ anything at first, but Bruce can see him mouth the name _Thomas_ without any sound behind it.

(Bruce hadn’t even considered who he would turn out looking like.)

“Bruce,” Alfred whispers, like a piece of the world’s come home.

* * *

“You look so much like your father.”

Bruce can count on one hand the amount of time he’s seen Alfred cry and most of them involved funerals. That he’s the source of it now…

(It’s happened once before, and it wasn’t very pleasant then.)

“I suppose I would. You always said how much I looked like him when I was younger.” The kitchen is exactly as Bruce remembers it, everything in its place. Ra’s had sent him back with some decent, fresh tea leaves, citing a need for any humans that worked with him to have a headache reliever and he brews some now with quick hands.

Alfred clutches the cup when it’s put in his hands and still doesn’t break the watery, blank expression he’s fixated Bruce with since Alfred had confirmed he was really Bruce. “I didn’t- I never thought I would see you like this. I didn’t think...”

“It’s alright, I can scarcely believe it some days either,” Bruce cracks a thin, lopsided smile as he settles into the chair across the kitchen table from Alfred. “It took a lot of getting used to.”

The noise Alfred drags out is terrible and heartbreak, even without a beating heart for Bruce to really break. “If I had known-”

“Alfred, you couldn’t have known this was possible, _I-_ ”

“If I had known, I would have let you go.” The empty look begins to crumble on Alfred’s face, like he’s aging years in seconds. “I’d have taken you myself, if I had to.”

Bruce opens his mouth to explain perhaps, how Ra’s was or the impossibility of Alfred keeping up with him but decides against it. “I didn’t know either really, until it happened. Even-” the feeling of Lazarus still _pulls_ at him, even here, even now, “-when I was going in… it was a pool, I can’t even explain what it did or does, but I don’t think I believed it myself until I crawled out.” The feeling of the Pit’s visions claw at his skin for a moment, before he shakes them off. “It wasn’t anything more than a mad whisper for years, I was chasing a rumour, a throwaway comment.” He blinks, curls his hands closed to keep his nails to himself before they can lengthen and harder. “I just couldn’t believe it. I thought I was going to be small forever.”

Alfred says nothing for a moment. “You said- your last call, you said you were looking to train, with someone who didn’t take a lot of students. Was it him?”

“Yes.” Bruce wishes he had something to drink as well, just to have something to do with his _hands_. “Yes, his name’s Ra’s al Ghul. He’s not- he’s human, still. What aged me keeps him alive, he’s _centuries old_. The stories people told of him- I’m sure half of them aren’t even true, but there’s- there’s no-one like me who doesn’t know of him.”

“He sounds dangerous,” Alfred looks like he’s considering getting angry for a moment, before it slips away. Asks “are you alright?” like it’s just any other night.

It’s been a stressful day - one of the most stressful Bruce can remember in a long, long time - but he pauses to think and remember the man who would sit on his balcony and talk to Bruce about the students who were so poorly dressed, the children that wouldn’t call, the poor way the tea was brewed, the fraying stitches of his books.

Bruce can’t help but laugh, small and weak like he can barely remember how and it’s over in a moment. “Oh Alfred, Ra’s- you’d have loved him. He would have loved you. You’d have spent hours alone moaning about the gray hairs I’ve given you both. He’s terrifying in his own way, but he’s fond of people he likes.” He trails off, thinking of all that’s behind him and all that’s in front. “I think I could even call him a friend.”

Alfred doesn’t say anything to that and Bruce doesn’t dare reach to see what he’s thinking, but he can guess.

Even with a gift like this, Alfred will never see the benefit of Bruce leaving.

* * *

The first night back - it’s harder than Bruce thought it would be. The city pulls, hisses at him and the halls after Alfred’s gone to bed just remind him of all the nights he used to spend bored and still wide awake.

He knows what he has to do but doing it is another matter. He has a plan, he has a _mission_ and he can feel that Gotham is unclaimed.

But Ra’s al Ghul was right. Taking Gotham - not part of Gotham, not a _fraction_ of Gotham, but all of Gotham - might kill him. Connecting to that much energy might kill him. Tapping into that many minds might kill him. 

He hasn’t even been back twelve hours.

But midnight comes and goes and finally Bruce can stand it no more. He’s still well-fed from his parting meal with the League and Alfred had drawn blood before going to bed.

He finds the silver knife Ra’s had pressed into his hand only earlier that day and the feeling of fresh blood still barely-warm beneath his own skin. He stands, he says the words, even though he knows it’s really more the intent and he _pierces_.

It hurts, it burns, but that’s the point. You bleed, for your territory. You bleed in your own way, with the taint flowing from your body.

He puts the black infused blood in the water and shadow walks to Gotham’s heart, onto its islands and spreads it there as well. He mediates at the clock tower, the centre of all three islands and stretches his mind as much as he can.

It’s so many lives, not all of them human. One and a hundred and a thousand and he hits a million when it really starts to hurt and keeps going until it’s seven million instead. Seven million minds, give or take a hundred thousand, all living in his city and he draws them together and in and around, binding them to the golden outline he’s traced around his part of the world.

Nobody’s held this much land since ancient times, since never maybe, and perhaps if it wasn’t Gotham, it wouldn’t work at all. But Gotham recognizes a _Wayne_ , even if it doesn’t recognize a lord and it welcomes him like he wasn’t even late getting here.

It hurts, no doubt about it and for a moment he can even feel death hovering there, waiting for him to fail.

But it’s a pain he can bear. Gotham is his now.

* * *

He had a plan.

He doesn’t tell Alfred right away what he’s going to do, but he’s hoping his old friend has at least an _idea_. Bruce asks so many questions about what’s been happening and how the city’s doing and he inquires after the caves under the manor and who’s in power.

He doesn’t tell Alfred, but he thinks Alfred knows he’s going to do _something_.

People like Bruce don’t train like he has to sit in a library once they come home.

* * *

He practices and he builds and he doesn’t bother coming up with a name for himself, for what he’ll be - either way, Ra’s had said the best way to let a legend grow was to never dispute, only confirm. What Gotham wants Bruce to be, he will be.

But he chooses black and covers his face and gives himself just enough armour that it looks like he’s trying to protect himself, even if he doesn’t need it. The cape- well, he’s seen enough comic books and bad movies to know it’ll make people look twice and he _wants_ them too. He wants them to be confused, if only for a second. He wants them to think about what they’re seeing.

He wants them to decide what he’ll be - but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a few ideas.

* * *

And the cape is useful too.

His kind can’t fly, but he only needs to look like he can. It’d been a wingless creature in Ra’s’ temple who had shown Bruce what one could do with a bit of cloth and some decent wind. His shadow walking does the rest and he breezes into Gotham like a nightmare rolling across the waves.

He starts slowly, as the best stories do, shortly after April of 1999 starts. He hunts the worst of the worst and lets the rumours start concerning their imprisonments. He lets himself be seen out of the corner of people’s eyes, he lets people see shadows ripple and shift.

It’s not _fun_ , but it settles something deep inside him that’s been too loud for too long. It’s not _easy_ , but he’s been trained by the best.

For months he lingers at the edges of Gotham’s conscious thought as he picks at the scabbing rot, leading the police to clues and victims, letting the evidence speak for itself. And when the legal system won’t give justice-

Well, even if you’re not going to prison, you can be damn well sure you’ll remember getting attacked by some strange creature that has you convinced you should leave town and shape up. A suggestion won’t hold _that_ long, but the idea only needs to be planted.

Fear will do the rest.

* * *

Bruce has traveled the world, met millions of humans.

But until he steps into Ace Chemicals, facing down a man in a red cape and a red helmet, he thinks he’s never even known the word _need_.

The scent beneath the man’s skin is the most intoxicating he’s ever come across and for a moment, Bruce freezes, struggling to control the urge to _bite_ for the first time in years.

In that moment, a gun sings, the man moves to avoid death and falls instead.

The Red Hood falls, disappears and there is nothing Bruce can do.

* * *

And so the Joker is born in the fading summer of 1999 from fire and water.

He is born screaming, as most are, the dark wrapping around him to hide the pain. He fights it with all his strength and still life claims him, marks him, binds him.

He is born howling for the thing that killed him, with love in his maddened voice, as only the damned can. He is born in misery and pain, is born to ruin and despair and yet-

And yet.

He chokes on blood, coughs on acid, spits out a tooth eroded in his mouth and does what he does best.

He laughs at the guts life must have to dare him to _live_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also forgot to mention - I have now changed my username and am going by AshToSilver on here and [Tumblr](http://ashtosilver.tumblr.com/). I am still Alex, I just don't have a day of the week in my name anymore.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello readers!
> 
> Okay, so, this story is going to be a little longer then intended. By a lot. If you were expecting a 30k-50k word story, first off so was I, secondly, its now more like 160k. Yeah. This is going to _long_. Thankfully, this is the last of the "set-up" chapters and the story will slow down, have less time skips and have a crap-ton more Joker after this! Also chapter 4 is in editing already. But it's probably not coming right away because I'm going on vacation next week. 
> 
> Thanks to [RosemaryBagels](http://rosemarybagels.tumblr.com/) for being an awesome beta and [Zapiarty](zapiarty.tumblr.com/) for providing the correct amount of capslock responses to a pre-read!
> 
>  **Warnings for:** none really unless you don't like extended metaphors, but why are you here if you don't? That's all I write. It's like weird AUs and metaphors, that's it.

The Gotham Gazette’s front page on August 1st, 1999 is a Sunday edition and headlines the title TROUBLE BREWING AT THE FACTORY with the byline _Mysterious Vigilante Strikes Again._

An up-and-coming reporter by the name of Victoria Vale spins a thrilling tale of a dark figure that had swooped in to save the day and freak out the majority of Gotham’s police department and criminal element. The piece was less critical than most, as Ms Vale’s admiration had been made quite clear, but everyone got the idea.

Bruce has been in town for less than four months and the Batman is simultaneously the best and worst thing to ever happen to Gotham. People love this monster, this man like people love a car crash. Everywhere you went there was talk and rumours, articles, supposed sightings and there isn’t a late night television special that hasn’t discussed the bat in some way.

Ms. Vale talks about the fight at the factory and everyone talks about it too.

But nobody talks about the man in the red hood.

* * *

The Joker- the Joker doesn’t even _exist_ at that point. He’s a nameless, faceless man behind a red mask who’d laughed until he’d screamed and had smelled like burning wood, sea salt and warm metal until he hadn’t.

Bruce knows he lives, but the Bat takes a bullet to the head that night at the factory and while the cowl protects him, the ringing noise in his ears takes a while to stop and the pounding headache even longer to fade. He evades the cops with a small burst of shadow walking but can’t concentrate long enough to pick out that man’s mind amongst the chaos.

Since Talia, Bruce has been closing off his mind to strangers, only reaching when he needs to. Even though there’s less that can hurt him here, with Talia an ocean away and Gotham barely knowing he’s real, it’s a struggle to convince himself to allow his senses to open passively again to those he doesn’t trust.

But Bruce supposes it doesn’t matter - he hadn’t been looking when the man had first appeared, so even if he could find that mind within the rush of people, he might not be able to recognize it.

He reads the papers the next morning and notes Ms. Vale’s name, he comes back the next night and finds nothing, breaks into the local precinct’s files and finds nothing, checks the hospitals and finds nothing and finally puts it to rest. He can’t even smell where the man might have _gone_ , that magnificent scent warped and hidden by acid.

The man must have survived and he must have been alright. They’d have reported a body.

There’s nothing to suggest otherwise.

* * *

They call him the Batman. Alfred says something of _vampires_ and _swarms of bats_ and Bruce pointedly ignores him for two days straight.

Turns out learning to tune out Henri Ducard had come in handy.

* * *

Bruce had known it would hurt to hold a territory and Ra’s had said it might even kill him, to take Gotham. But still Bruce had done it, binding so much dirt, brick and souls to his very being that he wondered how he’d managed it at all in the first place.

Holding Gotham is like trying to hold the weight of the world upon his shoulders. It’s a crushing ocean, a mountain threatening to collapse, a decaying orbit spinning in entropy; _seven million souls_ all pushing their thoughts and feelings and _lives_ on top of his until he can barely stand from the pressure.

This is the thing about territories; to an immortal they are _resources_. His kind craves blood, but they are sustained by life force. A territory provides by allowing the holder access to the energy produced by those living inside of it.

An undead holding a territory with a hundred humans living in it might be able to go an extra week before needing to feed. Bruce thought if he stopped feeding tomorrow, he might never need to start again.

But the downside is that to _hold_ a territory you have to _touch it_. All those lives, all that energy has to go somewhere and Bruce’s mind is the lightning rod through which that energy connects. It crashes through him, in and back out, like a small lake taking in a thousand rivers and pouring it all into the ocean. People with some energy and no energy and so much it practically made his teeth vibrate and he has to take it all, syphon off what he needs and redirect the rest back into Gotham, distributing it as evenly and as kindly as he could.

Most of the time he doesn’t need to think about it to do it, especially as the months go on and he gets used to it.

But some days the city bleeds, death and destruction staining the streets and Bruce spends all night out as Batman trying to fix it. It isn’t always something he can fight and he doesn’t always get there in time, but he _tries_. He tries so hard. Gotham is always bleeding, a ship taking on water and he does what he can, but it never feels like enough.

The nights aren’t too bad, even with all that. Maybe three people will die and he’ll feel their lives spark out like a bad light bulb. But then morning will come and the despair will crush him, as people read about it in the paper and see it on the news and walk past the crime scene.

A thousand minds that feel different are not nearly as powerful as a hundred that feel the _same_. One night a whole school is torched and the fear and anger that consumes the neighbourhood around it for weeks nearly puts him out of commission entirely. One afternoon the outer west-bound train rail has to go down for maintenance and tens of thousands can’t take the train back home. That time, he couldn’t even see through the headache brought on by so much frustration and anger.

If Gotham was happy, he could relax - if it was not, _that_ was when it hurt. He’d been expecting it, but he _hadn’t_.

Alfred worries. Alfred always worries, but Alfred worries especially when he see’s Bruce is in pain and won’t tell him why.

The thing is, Gotham is not _easy;_ it never has been and never will be. It’s easy to say those words, but it is not easy to live and live with it Bruce has to. It’s easy to say Gotham won’t kill him when he’s already dead. It’s easy to say he’ll protect Gotham when he’s the thing Gotham should be protected from.

Either way, he bears the weight. He bears the weight like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do and maybe it will be.

* * *

Bruce doesn’t sleep and so he doesn’t dream. But in the weeks after the factory, on some days when the sun’s at its highest and he’s bordering on idle, he remembers that scent. That scent from the nameless man in the factory, the scent that had gone beyond anything recognizable and had just been _alive_ , like electricity coursing through him, like the surge of energy from fresh blood but without the taste.

Bruce doesn’t dream, but sometimes his mind… drifts. He finds himself thinking of burying his nose in the curse of a warm neck, lapping a dry tongue over skin covered veins, pressing strong fingers to delicate bones and just _holding_ that magnificent thing in place.

It doesn’t always bother him.

But it does some days.

* * *

Gotham whispers, to its and its lord, Gotham whispers like the waves gentle against the rocks. _Break your bones and break your heart although your spirit will survive. Destroy your hopes and dreams and build a life that is worth living. Come away from all that’s bright and false and come to me, in the deep dark truth._

He is nameless, he is faceless, he is death and chaos and _pain_ and there is nothing in his head but- but- but- record skips and howling screeches and the-

The bat, maybe, possibly, _terribly_. Oh boy, the bat. Reaching for him but too late, always too late. He lies awake and remembers how late and dreams and recalls how late and he whispers it out loud with a throat burned with acid.

Gotham murmurs to him, so quiet and so sure and so cruel and so kind and he bleeds into the dirt and the floorboards and asks if it’s enough in return for his life. Please, give him back his life, his name, his face. Please give him back all that he lost.

But Gotham is the truth and the truth is that he won’t ever see any of that again.

Gotham laughs at him for asking.

And he laughs right back.

* * *

Three weeks after the factory, in mid August, Alfred insists they go out.

Bruce has never really had the chance to walk around Gotham as _himself_ and it’s a novelty in itself. He’d been so young when he’d been human and both of them had been too nervous to go out at all after Bruce _wasn’t_.

He’s been home for only a few months after a decade of travel and he’s so used to hiding, running - even here, even in _his_ territory, unarmoured, it’s difficult to think he’s even close to something _safe_.

He has to remind himself not to instinctively hide when people look in his direction, though he does throw up a passive suggestion to not look too closely at his sunglasses or the eyes behind them as the car pulls up next to a rented warehouse. 

Alfred’s clearly got a purpose and while Bruce doesn’t _look_ at what he’s thinking exactly, he does get the vague impression that Alfred’s been planning this for a while. Alfred knows the code to the door and his scent is heavy and stale in the air - he’s been here often, but not recently.

There’s another scent Bruce doesn’t recognize - another man who is not only here right now, but has been a lot more than Alfred ever has. This place is owned. Humans can’t really hold territories, but sometimes if they occupy a space long enough, it’ll start to scream _mine_ if you’re listening closely enough. Everything that Bruce sees - endless shelving units full of mechanical parts and half-built things - whispers heavy and low that it’s _been made_ , that it is not _Bruce’s_ and he should not _touch it_.

It makes him smile a little. Someone likes what they do and it shows.

The man in question - the inventor, the builder - is an older black man that tugs at Bruce’s memory, familiar and not. When he sees Alfred and Bruce, he smiles like they’re all old friends and Bruce senses a spike of interest peaking when the man focuses on him.

“Bruce, this is Lucius Fox,” Alfred says with a gentleness that suggests he’s about to try and make Bruce do something he doesn’t want to do. “You might not remember him, but-”

“You knew my parents,” Bruce says, the memories rushing back. “I think we met a couple of times, when I was- younger. That was a long time ago.”

Lucius’ face is fond when he smiles at Bruce. “Yes, a couple of times. I doubt you were more than seven,” and _there_ , there’s a hint of something at the corner of his mind, something that says _I know something I shouldn’t_ and Bruce- he doesn’t _look_ because it feels rude like this, but he does a closer sweep, even if it doesn’t reveal much. Lucius Fox is an inventor, an engineer and everything below the surface of his mind is a turning, moving, clockwork mess of a labyrinth. Even touching the outside feels complicated; Bruce doesn’t think he’s ever seen such a natural shield. You’d have to be a genius to understand something like that.

Not that he isn’t. But it would take a lot more than a glance to get through it and he told himself he _wouldn’t_.

“That sounds about right,” Bruce says, careful not to say much more. He wants Lucius to tell him what he knows and sure enough, it doesn’t take longer than a minute.

“I’ve heard you got an eye problem,” says Lucius, drumming his fingers against the workbench in front of him.

If Bruce had blood to run cold, it would have. But he’s pretty sure even Gotham flinches at his surge of panic and the black taint, the poison sitting in his chest, seems to twist around for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he says careful, picking up the feeling of Alfred wanting this conversation to get to its intended place, “what do you mean?”

“Alfred told me how you were having trouble seeing, since you got turned,” Lucius says, like it’s _nothing_. “I think I’ve developed a lens that might hide the black and help cut down on light if you would…” He trails off as he notices Bruce’s expression. “Have I said something wrong?”

“You told him?” Bruce whispers, sick fear worming into his gut as he turns to Alfred, whose mind screams guilty to even a mortal. “You _told_ him?”

“You were gone a long time,” Alfred says, pushing through that guilt with what he thought was _right_. “Lucius was a sympathetic ear and-”

“That was not your secret to give!” Every bone in Bruce’s body feels ready to crack with the _fear_ that’s coursing through him. He hasn’t felt this scared since Cain had set hunters on him as a lesson. “You can’t just- you can’t just _tell people_. It’s _dangerous_.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Lucius reassures, pressing his palms down to the bench and subconsciously projecting a fatherly calm. “Your secret is safe with me.”

“Not if someone pulls it from your mind,” Bruce hisses, genuinely snarling as something deep inside him rumbles, readying to fight. Lucius is strong, sure, carefully guarded but clockwork mechanisms are delicate and all it might take is a blunt force attack to break his defenses. “Not if someone _makes_ you tell them! You can’t just- this isn’t _safe_ , this isn’t safe for _you_ and it isn’t safe for me-”

He’s reaching before he can even think about it. Reaching for both of them and trying to _find_ where that knowledge was. He can feel them fighting, he can feel their minds _protesting_ and it isn’t until Alfred’s terror begins to seep through that Bruce realises he has grabbed ahold of both of their minds and is deep inside their memories, trying to find where the words had been spoken so he can _take them_.

He withdraws like an elastic band snapping back into place, almost painful with his retreat but he knows he’s messed up. They’re both staring at him, looks of pain and horror bleeding onto their faces as they realize what he’s done.

A trickle of blood drips from Lucius’ nose and he presses the back of a trembling hand to face without really seeming to know he has.

“I… I shouldn’t- I.” Bruce trails off, his lungs struggling to draw in air in a way they haven’t for a long time. “I apologize, I should not have done that.”

“... And what, exactly, was _that_?” Alfred asks, his voice much rougher than usual. “Pulling- you said someone could _make_ you-”

If possible, Alfred looks even more shaken then Lucius. And Bruce hadn’t been pushing half as hard for him.

Bruce opens his mouth, closes it again as he notes the lack of air and has to force himself to breath enough to talk. It’s as painful as he remembers it being, back when it used to hurt all the time, and he finds he hasn’t missed the feeling at all. “I… my _kind_ usually have… access to some... small mental abilities...” He stops, he knows the rest and still it won’t come into his mouth.

They both stare at him in clear shock. This wasn’t where either of them were expecting this meeting to go, by the looks of things.

“How… how long have you been able to do that?” Alfred asks, after a moment. “Have you been _meddling_ all these years?”

“No!” Bruce presses his fists behind him, feeling nails dig painfully into flesh. “I mean, I could hide myself a bit, but I didn’t know I could-”

“ _Hide?_ You were- all those times I couldn’t find you, where had you gone?”

“Hiding?” Lucius asks, more to himself than anything, “or making someone _think_ you’re hiding?”

“The latter,” Bruce replies softly, “I can just… passively suggest that someone not pay attention. Alfred- I didn’t really mean to. I was young and in pain and I _had nowhere to go_.”

It hurts to say it. He knows Alfred gets it. Bruce can see the look on Alfred's face, even if he’s busy keeping his powers to himself. Alfred might not like it, but Alfred was as scared to leave the Manor as Bruce had been.

Who knew what Bruce might have done, if left alone too long.

“I suppose I should apologize as well,” Lucius says, after a moment of silent stare-off. “I didn’t realize that this was something you weren’t comfortable with me knowing about. I’m guessing you’ve learned some unpleasant things while you were away.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Bruce whispers. “Alfred-”

“You can _control people_.”

“I- I.” He hadn’t said that but it’s _true_. There is no real defense for that one. “If I push hard enough, yes.”

Neither man says anything for a moment. Bruce has pulled in his mind as much as he can, enough to detect not even a flicker from Alfred, even if Alfred doesn’t _know that_.

“When were you planning on telling me this?” Alfred asks, after a moment. “Since you apparently couldn’t find time in the past _four months_ you’ve been back?”

Bruce tries to draw in a study breath, painful and slow and mostly fails. “Alfred, I wasn’t planning to control you. I _don’t_ read your thoughts, I don’t plant suggestions. I may _hear you_ sometimes, when you’re projecting, but that’s it. There’s no more.”

If Alfred had looked upset before, it’s nothing compared to now, such a some hostile edge to his gaze that makes Bruce shiver. “You weren’t planning to tell me at all.”

“I was,” Bruce starts, stops. “I was, in two months. I wasn’t- Ra’s, he said that would probably be the stabilization point anyway. If I could make it that long, I’d be fine.”

Alfred blinks, stares. “What?” He almost stutters for a moment, swallows. “What- what do you mean? Bruce?”

“I’m guessing neither of you have ever heard of a territory before, have you.”

* * *

It turns out what Alfred had taken Bruce to see had been contact lenses, of all things.

“Seems sort of redundant now that I know you don’t need them,” Lucius said as he held out the container of fluid. “But this’ll at least take the strain off having to manage it, and it’ll cut down on the glare.”

Bruce lifts a coloured lenses out of the fluid. “I wouldn’t mind it, I can say that.” It’s not easy to stick the lense in, but he manages it, blinking away what suddenly feels like an abnormal amount of fluid in his eye. “Though, I think my eyes are used to producing a lot less moisture than this.”

Lucius smiles, “we can fix that in post production. Light levels?”

Bruce turns, surveying the room as he takes in various light sources and how the lense handles it. The room’s still awash in flares of light and colour, but it is muted and he can make out shapes behind the larger spots and the details further away.

Alfred is still sitting at the table, fists clenched in front of him and a stormy look on his face. Bruce tries to push the guilt back, Ducard had taught him that at least.

Ducard had also taught him how to use most of his basic powers. He isn’t sure Ducard is someone he should be emulating right now.

“It looks good,” Bruce says after a moment. “It's a lot better than I’m used to, anyway. I swear I can actually see faces for once when the light’s on.”

Lucius chuckles at that, and pulls forward another container. “Try this next, it should give you an improvement in light reduction, though we might lose some of the colour.”

Alfred’s hands almost twitch, as if he wants to tear the container away. “Perhaps this isn’t the time to focus on this,” he says after a moment, voice edged with a hollow tone.

Bruce pauses, pulling the contact from his eye. “Alfred, there is nothing you can do-”

“ _Nothing_ , after all these years-”

“ _Alfred_ , there is _nothing_ you can do to help me carry this weight.” It hurts to say and it sounds wrong in his mouth even as he speaks it. “This is supernatural in origin, and I’m afraid you can’t help me with it.”

The set in Alfred’s jaw says otherwise. “You weren’t even going to tell me this could _kill you_.”

“I had no reason to worry you over something I thought I could handle,” Bruce reiterates. “And I was right. I am holding Gotham now and I’m doing just fine.”

The look Alfred gives him could have made Ra’s al Ghul himself shiver. “You think this is about _Gotham_? You think this is about your stupid territory?”

“I didn’t say that-”

“ _You could have died_ and you didn’t _even think to tell me_. You can _read minds_ and you didn’t _think to tell me_.”

“I-”

“If your _parents_ could see you now,” Alfred spits, tall on his feet and rage on his face, “they would have been _ashamed_ of what you’re doing! How could you? It’s like the child I knew _died_ -”

And just like that, Alfred stops, breathing heavily and quivering from the stress. The words die in his mouth and surprise flitters around his face before it and the anger fades. “I didn’t- I mean- Bruce.”

“You know, I used to think it was a good thing only I survived,” Bruce whispers, “I thought they didn’t deserve to see me like this. But we’re both right; they would have been ashamed, I shouldn’t have survived at all.”

And he leaves in shadow.

* * *

Does Gotham weep for its lord? Does it weep for the bat, who owns all even if nobody _knows that?_

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe Gotham does.

He doesn’t know, really. It’s been a long time now, most of his new life, what little there’s been of that. But he feels Gotham tremble and shriek for a second, a split second and he howls along with it.

Gotham whispers to him _come now the night will sooth your burns_ and he whispers back _I have given everything and all I want is something in return. I need to see him. I need to see him._

_Soon,_ Gotham murmurs, pain not-his-own vibrating through his bones, _soon_.

* * *

Bruce doesn’t go back to the Manor. At least, not that night.

There are many places to hide in Gotham and with a thick enough suggestion, a supernatural bar lets him in without even noticing he’s the one holding Gotham. He tunes out their whispers at the newcomer and buys blood that tastes days old while he hunkers down in a corner.

Bruce thinks oddly of his mother, and the few stories he knew of her. Martha Wayne had been a woman of great reknown, a nurse who’d met his father in university. She’d been known to be terrifying and Bruce had seen many faded posters and signs from protest rallies and marches she’d attended over the years, though he has no memory of going.

(A photo, tucked into an old journal, of three year old Bruce clinging to his shouting mother says otherwise, but Alfred has no story he’s willing to share to go with it and Bruce has found no other details.)

Martha Wayne had been angry. She’d made rash decisions all the time, to the point that her husband had been questioned as to the safety of his own marriage. She had kept secrets and had harsh words and Thomas, Bruce’s father, had forgiven them all.

Alfred speaks so fondly of them both, sometimes Bruce forgets that he isn’t treated the same. Alfred will always see Bruce as _his_ _child_ , as his surrogate son, and that means that no matter what Bruce does, no matter how similar he looks to Martha or Thomas, he will never be treated the same way.

A surge of _something_ tugs at him for a moment and he presses a hand to his forehead. Gotham has been restless since their fight, like it’s sensing his turmoil. He does his best to sooth the feeling, trying to reassure the city and the people in it, but he doesn’t know if it works at all and the restless tingle fades after a moment on its own.

Bruce might have stopped opening up to every mind he felt nearby, but he’s still been feeling something, and tonight he tries to shut it all down. Even keeping so much closed, he has still let so much through. Even just Alfred, alone in the house, had been enough to provide constant background noise and as Bruce shuts down the feeling of the other patrons, the waitresses, the barkeeper, the people outside and down the street, he mourns the loss. It hurts to be alone.

_But they’ve all got a right to their privacy, Alfred too and you know it_ , his own mind hisses. _Alfred_ didn’t know _you could do this_. _They don’t know you can do this. You’re taking what hasn’t been given_.

And he knows that. Bruce doesn’t have a right to be to hear Alfred’s mind and Alfred is well within his rights to ask him not to, he’s within his rights to be angry at Bruce for it as well. Bruce doesn’t have the right to feel or listen to anyone, but he _does it anyway_.

The only argument Bruce can make is that they are all members of Gotham, and therefore they fall under Bruce’s mental protection. Except they hadn’t consented to that either and what more could you say about that?

He has to hold Gotham. It is the only option he has. He needs to protect his people and that means going above and beyond what they would have asked for. Gotham _needs him_.

Afterall, people have died from his kind before, and they will again. His parents hadn’t deserved to die and while the scent might be almost two decades old-

Well, there have never been many immortals in Gotham. He can find one killer who can’t die. He can find his sire.

* * *

Jim Gordon does not consider himself easily spooked. He’s lived in Gotham for years; over fifteen years now and honestly it wears on him, but he-

Well, he doesn’t love it, but he’s been here long enough that it doesn’t matter anymore. He can’t leave and he isn’t sure he wants to. He can say it’s for his kids, he can say it’s for his wife, his coworkers, the decent people of Gotham, but he thinks he might be lying.

Gotham clings to people like a mould, a fungus, a parasite. It clings to him, like a nightmare, a bad idea and a digging thought. He can’t get rid of it, no matter what he does.

And part of him is fine with that. He’s had a long time to get used to it.

He’s working the late shift, trying to keep his eyes open against endless paperwork as he fills forms and corrects the mistakes of his coworkers. It’s not fun, but it’s needed and if he leaves it to others there will never an honest report in this building.

Jim smears ink on his hands and drinks too much coffee and wonders if his wife has gone to bed lonely again.

He’s heading back to the files room when he feels a faint prickle down his spine. It’s not something _bad_ , but he gets the feeling that something is out of place, that something isn’t where or what it should be. Anywhere else, he wouldn’t be too concerned, but he knows that Gotham doesn’t work like that. It’s too cruel to be kind in these sort of situations.

He keeps an eye on the hallway as he pushes the records room’s door open and almost runs straight into a man he’s never seen before. At first, he’s sure he sees oddly coloured eyes and civilian clothes before he blinks and a young rookie is there instead, uniform exact to regulations.

“Detective Gordon,” the rookie says. “I was just thinking of you.”

Jim blinks again, feeling something similar to a headache building in his forehead. “Um, can I help you with something?”

And that’s when he sees the folder in the rookie’s hands. The Waynes’ murder file, labeled _Cold_ in 1984, old and faded, dusty even from here and something deep in Jim’s gut lurches unhappily.

He hasn’t seen that file in years and he _wrote it_.

“Actually, I was just wondering if something had happened to this file?” The rookie holds it up to show the thinness of the folder. “I was just taking a brief look and noticed it didn’t even have an autopsy report.”

“What?” Jim blinks, looking confused. “That’s impossible, I signed the report myself-”

But the folder that’s passed to him is very clearly missing pieces. “This is impossible. I wrote most of this file, it was an inch thick! I worked the case for over a year- _Francis_.”

On the front page is a report stating that there was nothing suspicious about the Waynes’ death - a mugging gone wrong, no leads, nothing _serious_ \- and his old partner’s signature, plain and as ugly as it had been back then. “Francis, you didn’t.”

“Your partner falsified the report.” The rookie doesn’t look so surprised at that. If anything, he looks like he had been expecting it. “This case was tampered with - who would do that?”

The image swims to Jim’s mind, along with a painful twinge. Francis had been a dirty cop through and through and Jim had hated every minute of the three years they’d worked together. Yes, he remembers what Francis had looked like and where he’d liked to go and the people he’d liked to meet with and his _death_ , that shitty funeral in ‘85.

The rookie makes a frustrated noise, so low Jim almost doesn’t catch it. “Any idea who might have done it?” The rookie asks after a moment, some edge to his voice Jim couldn’t place. “I mean, the case, the murder, I know it’s cold but-”

“It was probably a hit,” Jim says numbly. “I… you know, this isn’t the first time this has happened to a file, but I honestly wasn’t expecting it to happen to such a high profile case.”

“It was a big case?”

It’s so strange, the feeling in Jim’s head. Kind of fuzzy, sort of painful but without the pain. He feels like someone’s numbed his gums and is digging into a cavity. He can _feel_ that it should hurt, but it doesn’t. And all these images; he hasn’t thought about the Waynes’ file in years, but all the memories come flooding back like it was yesterday. Talking to so many people and hearing so many rumours and running into so many dead ends and ending the investigating because it was that or their jobs.

Names and faces and details and Jim doesn’t even realize he’s almost fallen over until the rookie’s cold hand is grabbing his elbow. Jim blinks and tries to focus on the face before him - he can’t ever remember seeing this young man before, but he doesn’t feel concerned about it oddly enough. “I think I’ve had a little too much coffee,” Jim says after a moment, after struggling to catch whether the rookie’s eyes were blue or hazel or green. “It’s been…”

“-a long day,” the rookie finishes for him. “You’ve worked hard, Jim, thank you.”

“What?” Jim asks, and blinks.

The file room is empty besides him, the door still closed. There’s no sign of the rookie cop and no sign he had been there to start.

Except for the file in Jim hands, that is.

Jim Gordon is not easily spooked, but he might have been tonight.

* * *

The file just makes things worse, really.

Being the Batman is harder than being Bruce. He’s been dressed in black before and has hunted countless humans across many countries, but Gotham is _demanding_. It takes in what he offers and all that it sees and demands better. Even with all his advantages, he can barely keep up. There is always a sickness, always a problem just around the corner. He sits for a moment and someone dies. He goes down the wrong street and thousands of dollars are lost. He focuses on one thing when it should have been another and every morning he goes back into hiding tired and worn, feeling like he’s had more failures than successes.

But when it comes to moments like this - he prefers being Batman to being _Bruce_. He doesn’t want to think of the empty file in Jim Gordon’s hands, he doesn’t want to think of the suggestions, looking and glamours he’s had to use to find out what the detective had known. His parents’ death had been a murder or at least an accident someone had tried to cover up.

He thinks about giving up, for three minutes after he leaves the precinct. He thinks about releasing Gotham - it's always struggling to break his hold, it wouldn’t be _hard_ , he thinks of never speaking to Alfred again, he thinks of what a normal life would look like, if he was human with a beating heart and no rot to think of in his head.

But then he feels a surge of _something_ , at the back of his skull, like someone tapping their fingers. 

He knows that feeling. He’s heard it described, he’s read about it, he felt something like it at the bar and it’s not the first time he’s had it since he’s come home.

Someone is calling his name. Someone in his territory is calling for him, asking for him. Asking for the Batman, the lord of Gotham to save them and so the city has passed the message along.

And so even if it’s one out of seven million, he must remain. It is his duty. He lets the call tug him to a sagging warehouse near the easternmost Downtown docks and drags some shrieking youth out from beneath a minor gang’s fists. The kid’s not even eighteen and stutters some sort of thanks before he runs too.

Perhaps the problem does not lie with Bruce, in a sense. Gotham _is_ difficult and to get anywhere is to claw himself up a cliffside. There are places with stairs, but then again, the view at the top of Gotham is said to be incredible when you get there.

Gotham tries to kill him, it really does. It’s succeeded once before and it’ll try again. The Batman is hated and loved and disbelieved and protected all at once and if it were not Gotham’s _nature_ to accept challenges, perhaps it wouldn’t work at all.

But it does work. It begins to work and it keeps working. Alfred’s words linger, his memories of the factory linger, the League’s other students, his teachers, they all linger.

He doesn’t feel like he can go home and maybe that doesn’t matter, but he stands before the city near the water, looking back over three islands and a shoreline and realizes what he’s been missing.

Perhaps it was always there, but he figures the rest out on a towering spire of metal he uses for a perch. Gotham is hard and difficult, untrustworthy and volatile and the only reason it hasn’t killed him yet was because it _likes_ him.

So many challenges Gotham has issued, to the weaker among the city. So many times Gotham has said _give me all you’ve got and I’ll give you everything in return_ and so many times have people failed. They can not give everything, for to do so is impossible.

And Bruce can’t either, not really. But he is damn well _trying_ and he realizes there, with the sun beginning to tint the clouds, that perhaps that’s the whole trick to it really. Gotham has swatted him aside again and again, it gets in his way, it has taken nearly everything he’s loved, has killed him and salted his corpse and still he’s gotten back up and stood ready to take the next blow.

And Gotham loves him for it. It loves a challenge and it loves him for taking the hardest one Gotham had to offer; _take care of this place because nobody else will_.

It takes a while, but he thinks he gets it. Gotham will never stop, but it’ll love him for trying all the same.

* * *

Every morning Bruce reinforces his hold over Gotham. It’s a difficult time, a surge of emotion and wakefulness as most people claw their ways out of sleep and every morning he’s almost crushed beneath the overwhelming urge to drink coffee and complain about getting kids he doesn’t have to school.

It’s… baffling and strange and oddly comforting, like Gotham is including him in something he’s never been included in before. That being said, he has to spend a good hour or so hidden away every morning, struggling to keep a grip on the feeling of defiance that arises from unhappy people, moody teenagers and new problems. It gets easier as the months go on, but it still hurts to hold, for that hour or two.

This is how Alfred finds him. Bruce hasn’t been entirely creative with his hiding places and Ra’s taught that it was easier to manage a territory from someplace that was _yours_ , so he’d used an old townhouse his family owns.

The pressure is so much Bruce can’t even get up off the floor. He notices the presence that approaches him but he’s so busy draining that excess energy from a hundred ADHD kids that just want to sit through class and giving it to patients trying to find the strength to fight their illnesses. He’s finding the minds drowning in depression and anxiety and soothing the edges as much as he dares, tries to find the minds full of bad ideas and remind them of the Batman.

Bruce feels Alfred there, feels that towering oak tree of thoughts and memories plant itself next to the maelstrom that is Gotham nesting in Bruce’s mind. Bruce feels Alfred touch cold skin and that oak is just picked up and slipped into the stream without Bruce really being able to do anything about it.

Bruce would be concerned about it, but he’s not really _here_ right now. His body maybe, but in that hour or two every morning-

Bruce doesn’t exist, in the mornings. The Batman doesn’t exist either. _Gotham_ is in every brick and soul and it’s in him too. It’s digging into every cell and pulling out his insides to slip inside. For an hour or two, he is not Bruce, is not the Batman, he’s _Gotham_ , he’s Gotham’s _soul_ , its beating _heart_ -

(How ironic, considering he doesn’t have one of those.)

He is buried in Gotham, set alight by Gotham and it takes far too long for him to crawl back after it’s all over. He blinks black, soulless eyes and sees Alfred haloed by the faint hints of light through the heavy curtains.

“Is it like that every day?” Alfred asks, and Bruce sees the tears running down his cheeks, the blood dripping slowly from his nose, one set of fingers white at the knuckle where they are clutching Bruce’s arm.

“You could feel that?” Bruce asks, voice cracking even with a permanently dry throat.

“A little,” Alfred blinks, stunned, free hand touching the blood on his lip and looking surprised, “like sticking your fingers in water and feeling the current.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Bruce props himself up onto his elbows. “It could have hurt you, physic feedback is a killer.”

“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt,” Alfred whispers, like Bruce isn’t even talking. “I had no idea. I had-” he pauses, stops, refocuses on him. “I didn’t know.”

He’s talking about more than just Gotham claiming Bruce as much as Bruce is claiming it.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce says, and that’s the end of that. Or close enough anyway.

* * *

_I’m sorry, I’m sorry_ , he howls and all Gotham says back is _I’m sorry, I’m sorry too_.

It doesn’t make a damn thing better, but-

* * *

So much of Bruce’s life - or the thing he calls his life now - has been consumed with the struggle for air. His lungs have failed him more times then a heart that’s more metaphorical than real anyways. He might be _dead_ , but he needs air to speak, air to smell and hunt and track and when his lungs won’t expand and contract, he has no option but to sit and wait.

It’s a weird feeling, being so still you don’t even need to blink. It’s a weird feeling, but there’s not much he can do. Gotham pushes and pulls like the tide shaping the coastline and he tries to breath, just to breath. He needs to smell the salt and asphalt, the brick and blood of every building and person and maybe _then_ he’ll be okay.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Four weeks after the factory, a man with skin the colour of bleached bone and untouched snow bursts into existence and that’s the end of that. 

* * *

It starts like the whine of his hearing coming back from an explosive. It starts like the flatline of a heart monitor and it _grows_ until it consumes everything he feels. It is panic and horror and excitement and Bruce nearly chokes on it.

Gotham is screaming, excited and delighted and scared, jumping from one foot to the other and demanding _is the bat coming out to play?_ Gotham is calling and yelling and wanting; honestly Bruce has never put the suit on faster. He’s armed and ready and out the cave before he can even properly find where everything’s coming from.

Midtown is on fire, literally and metaphorically. Four small standalone buildings are ablaze, sitting as the corners of a perfect square. Bruce feels for minds that are in pain, struggling to breath and finds none; there are no people dying, though the pattern must have been deliberate.

Oh, this is defiantely deliberate; the buildings picked where the flames won’t spread easily, low enough and late enough in the evening that the businesses are closed. People are scared, sure, but they aren’t hurt and it’s clearly meant to draw attention.

Bruce shadow walks to the roof of a nearby apartment building and _reaches_ , searching for a mind that might have done this. It’s possible they fled the scene, it’s possible that this is a distraction but something about the feeling Gotham is giving him says otherwise.

When he finds it, it’s like he trips on a stone and falls into a squirming abyss of horrors. It’s a mind full of bright colours, loud noises and sensory overload. It’s a mind full of _motive_ , intention and desire. It’s a mind that screams, screams for people to _pay attention_ and see what this man is doing.

It’s a mind that’s breaking, fast-forwarding slow-motion shattering like a tape of a dropped glass. It’s a mind that’s in _pain_ , that’s suffering and struggling to keep track of the bright flames and dark shadows and fleeing people, that’s struggling to keep fingers steady on a cane that’s partially for show and partially to keep a body still recovering standing upright. It’s a mind that Bruce wants to recoil from but doesn’t.

He could but he doesn’t.

He could shut this all down in a second but he doesn’t.

The Batman comes roaring from the dark like a noiseless nightmare, like a predator making the final leap onto waiting prey. He comes howling from the shadows into the exact centre of the fires, a small tiled squares with a couple of benches and some trees.

There’s a man standing there, human and mortal, sleek and slender, weirdly elegant and carefully strange. He’s got ghost-white skin and acid-green hair and is clad from head to foot in royal purple, a hat atop his head and a cane in his hands as he spins, nearly _twirls_ a second before slamming the cane end to the pavement, back arched and limbs shivering as he poses.

He stands, he stares, he _smirks_ , he grins like it’s going to end the world, he smiles like he’s been waiting an age for the Batman and he’s so damn happy Bruce is here now.

From his crouch at the square’s edge, Bruce pulls himself to his full height like it’s a challenge, stares from behind a cowl and lensed eyes and he _smells it_.

It’s only the faintest wiff, the dimmest echo, something even he wouldn’t be able to find unless he was standing on top of it. _The man at the factory_. The man with the red hood, who had smelled like beginnings and endings and all the things Bruce just _wanted_.

It clings to this man’s skin, buried beneath gasoline and antibiotics. It comes from his blood and it smells so _warped_ , so _changed_ , like whatever had burned the man’s skin had burned his insides too.

It would certainly explain the devastation radiating from that skull. Bruce had known the man survived, but _this_.

This is barely surviving, this is barely _healing_. This is madness and need and Bruce really just wants to bury his teeth, his fangs into that pale neck and _feed_.

He’s been trained by the best, but he’s so stunned by what he’s found that he misses how fast the man moves. The cane slams into his cowl hard enough for it to crack, the left ear snapping and his comm uplink dying with a screech as the kelver plastic splinters.

The second swing he catches with ease, one hand coming up just fast enough to stop the metal from breaking the cowl’s lenses.

The man is inches from him, waxy lipstick making that face-splitting grin all the more vicious, green eyes wide with some emotion that’s mostly nauseating. His hands are wrapped in white leather gloves tainted with soot and lighter fluid, his purple jacket a few shades off from his pants and ivory burn scars visible on delicate wrists. He is mania and desperation made into flesh.

Bruce catches the second swing and the man _laughs_. He giggles near-silently, loses it to a deep chuckle and within a matter of seconds is struggling to contain the full on torrent of sounds escaping his howling mouth.

It is nothing but teeth and sound, nothing but emptiness and completion. It is nothing like anything Bruce has seen or heard of before and for a split second-

For a split second, he wonders if this burning feeling in his chest and lungs is what love or lust or attraction feels like.

And then the man stumbles and Bruce feels that mind shiver, twitch, shudder. It’s coming apart at the seams and Bruce being there is making it _worse_. He pushes, because he can and he’s fairly sure even one hit will destroy this fragile being, he pushes through like pushing through a thick skin until the surface breaks and he almost wishes he hadn’t.

He thought he knew pain. He thought he knew chaos. He thought he knew-

But he doesn’t. He hadn’t. This mind is broken, in pieces, barely there and the only thing it-he-it knows is that the Batman tried to save him. This mind _remembers_ the factory, this mind remembers the feeling of falling and the bat reaching but not being fast enough, not being able to shake off the bullet to the bat’s own head. This mind remembers the excitement and the fear and the instant _want_ that had come from seeing the bat in the flesh.

It is the only thing this mind remembers. It is the only thing this mind understands.

Bruce sees all this man, this monster, this madness is and the man sees _him_.

The man senses the bat in his head and laughs, lungs quivering as Bruce fists his shirt and mind rippling with the mental sound. It takes all of Bruce’s strength to plant his feet into nothingness and hold tight long enough to exit without damage. He stands for only a minute in that mind and in that minute, the man near consumes him.

Bruce retreats and has never felt better and never felt _worse_. The man drives a knife through kelver plates and into a dead kidney.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Bruce snarls and the man hiccups laughter back at him.

“Why darling,” comes the purr and what a purr it _is_ , “clowns aren’t _nice_.” He giggles and pulls the blade out without a thought. “That’s not part of the _joke_.”

Bruce blocks the next swing, the cane tossed aside and he hits back this time, still trying to shake off the energy of want and need the man, the _clown’s_ mind had held. There’s a wheeze from the smaller man as they break apart and muscles protest as Bruce tries not to break every bone he connects with.

“Is that all you’ve got?” the man stumbles back, one arm limp from Bruce’s nerve strike. “Is that all you’re going to give me? Oh darling, you’ve barely _hit me_ ,” and he laughs again as Bruce’s punch sends him sprawling to the ground.

The next hit is restrained but still so violent as Bruce’s fist splits the man’s lip and near instantly bruises the pale skin. That howling noise is contagious, dangerous and he lands another fist and another and realizes-

Realizes he’s gone right back in. He can _feel_ the pain of his own fists connecting to skin, he can feel the weight of the bat’s body pressing down on tender skin, he can feel the man, the clown moaning _yes, yes_ in a mind that won’t listen.

Bruce had escaped and then fallen right back into the clown’s mind like he’d been standing on the shore and the sand beneath his feet had just swallowed him whole with barely a shift and only the pull of a single wave. The chaos is trying to eat him, merge with him and he struggles against it.

The man clings, sharp fingers finding purchase and mental noise grabbing ahold. For a moment it feels like the man’s trying to keep him here and it isn’t until Bruce tries to pull back that he realizes the man wants Bruce to _take him away_.

This mind is so miserable and shattered that even its bearer doesn’t want it anymore. The man _knows_ without remembering that nobody’s ever tried to help this body, this mind before, but the _bat is_. The bat is trying to help, the bat is digging his heels in and steadying himself in the hurricane, the forest fire that is this destruction. And the man wants, wants, wants.

_Please_ , says the clown and it’s not even funny. He doesn’t know what he’s suppose to do.

_I can’t fix this_ , whispers Bruce, the bat, the boy who died so many years ago. 

But maybe that’s a lie.

Martha Wayne had been tenacious like it was the most precious thing in the world. He had learned this at her knee and in her final moments, death upon her, even then she had fought.

Bruce digs his heels in, finds the bat deep inside the man’s memory and pins it to the bottom, like the lightning rod to Ra’s sandstorm-covered ground.

_This,_ he says to madness, _will never change_.

Bruce comes out of it with the taste of the taint, his poison, the venom in his mouth, dripping from unretracted teeth.

The man is lying on the ground beneath him, eyes fluttering shut and skin dappled with police siren lights.

The clown’s blood is all over Bruce’s hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zapiarty made art for the end of this chapter! You can see it [here](http://zapiarty.tumblr.com/post/149025258765/)!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... I am very sorry for the break guys, my life has been- well, it's been a very eventful month, actually. At least ya'll get Joker. *jazz hands*

They call him the Joker.

He has no other name.

* * *

The clown wakes up strapped to a bed. He’s got the dimmest memories, the faintest feeling that perhaps this isn’t the first time and something deep inside of him wants to _scream_ at the thought.

But screaming has never done a lick of good and laughter’s _so_ much better for the soul. He wiggles a raw tongue between a tooth or two and giggles just to hear it. Everything aches in a delicious way that just makes him _shiver_ , even as his fingers involuntarily cling to cheap hospital blankets.

A nurse swims into view, a frown on her face and a clipboard in her hands. She looks as happy to see him as he is to be there and she scowls even deeper when he smiles back viciously.

“Any chance a gentlemen can get some water or perhaps a key?” He asks through a face-splitting grin, pulling at the straps as he squirms. Bruises throb as he twists and moves, angling sharp curves in a manner that could be considered flirtatious if you were into that sort of thing.

The nurse sneers with a lot of teeth. “Two detectives are here to talk to you; your intake interview will happen afterwards.” Her heels click as she walks away and he clicks his tongue along to the pattern.

Oh, this is going to be fun.

“So, you’re the Joker,” the voice to his right says, and the clown turns to see a couple of tired looking officers eyeing him with no small amount of concern. The second one elbows the first as he speaks.

“Is that what they’re calling me these days?” The man, the clown purrs, “you know, I kinda like it. Joker. That’s me, a regular comedian.” He laughs at it and them, a chilling laugh that unsettles the room.

“My name is Detective Jim Gordon,” says the second, adjusting his glasses and pulling out a notepad. “This is my partner, Harvey Bullock. You have been arrested after committing arson and are currently in Arkham Institute for the Criminally Disturbed pending a psychological evaluation. Can you tell me your name for the record?”

“You know, I can’t quite recall,” the clown replies. “It’s been such a long day… well, not _day_ , but you get the idea. I really don’t know what all the fuss is about, I just wanted to meet my little _guardian angel_ before I ceased to exist at all, you know.”

Hmm, the bat. The bat is like a pebble in his shoe; the need to see that little beasty again had consumed him for so long - his _whole live-long life_ , really - but now that he has, he doesn’t feel like he thought he would.

“You destroyed four buildings and terrorized a couple of city blocks,” says Bullock, “we’re gonna need a little more then _don’t recall_.”

“But I _really_ , really don’t,” the man says, “Joker, you say? I suppose that makes sense, they named _him_ , they should name me too. Joker. Joker. I like it. I can be the Joker.”

“Can you tell us anything about yourself?” Gordon prompts with a strange edge to him - like he’s considering _gentleness_ and that just won’t do in Gotham. “Are you having trouble remembering things at the moment?”

“Er, you can’t really _remember_ what doesn’t exist,” the clown- _Joker_ says, “I was born only last month, you know. Born of a metal womb, you could say. Haven’t got a name, haven’t got a home, haven’t got a destiny yet. Oh, I’m sure I _had_ one, but old me died, as it was. That guy couldn’t keep a kitten alive, let alone himself; fell right off the catwalk, he did, like a fool. Like a- like a _fool_.” The Joker snorts, a cruel noise in his throat. “I’m all that’s left now. The Joker. I like it.”

“What’s the date?” Bullock asks.

“I hear Halloween’s not too far off.”

“Can you name the president?” Gordon asks.

“Richard Milhous Nixon!”

“How did you die?” Bullock asks.

Oh, the words don’t come for that one. He opens his mouth, sure, but not even the laughter comes for that one. He jerks a hand to reach for that nice tender spot on his head, but the straps stop him, so he rubs it a bit on the pillow to make the tingling go away.

“Were you hurt?” _There’s_ Gordon’s gentleness, like a little idiot.

He can’t stop the shivers that go down his body at that one either. This one wasn’t as much fun as he thought it would be. They just like to dig a bit too much, didn’t they. It’s not fun, the only digging he enjoys is the type the _bat_ did last night.

( _Stay strong, stay strong_ , whispers something in his head that sounds like _Gotham_.)

“What have you been doing recently?” Gordon prompts again.

“The bat,” the Joker says, and giggles, “or I wish. At least I’ve been _trying_ ; wanted to say goodbye and thanks and have a good day and all that that.”

“Goodbye?”

“Well, the nameless can’t _live_ , now can they, Jim-Jim-dear. Haven’t got a name, haven’t got a soul, that’s the way Gotham rules. Figured I should say everything in person before I depart this lovely, ugly world.” He blinks. “But ah, guess it’s sort of pointless now; Joker, you say? Well, I certainly am so, at least it _fits_. That’s good, I did enjoy meeting the bat again. You should try it! He _gets right in your head_.”

Poor Bullock sighs over the Joker’s laughter. “Christ, Jim, he’s coco-puffs and I’m tired.” He shudders as the laughter goes on. “I’m getting a coffee, see you in a minute,” and then he just spins on his heels and marches off.

“New here?” Joker wheezes, but dear Gordon ignores the question. “You know, I’m sure you need to be all stoic and mean for your job, but I really wouldn’t mind something to drink either, I _did_ just get beaten up. Head hurts like a doozy.”

Gordon seems to consider this for a moment, but he does get a paper cup of water with a straw. It’s not the best thing the clown’s ever had, but it’s still a welcoming relief.

“You know, I can’t decide what feels, ah, _better_ ,” the Joker purrs, after he’s drained most of it, “all these _lovely_ bruises or what Batsy did to my head, rummaging around in there.”

Gordon opens his mouth to say something and then closes it, with an odd look on his face. “Rummaging?”

“Oh, you know,” Joker wiggles a few trapped fingers, “he just got right in there. Barely noticed at first, but a guy pays attention when he starts remembering things he ain’t thought about in a _long_ , long time. All that digging- well, it actually didn’t really _hurt_ , not quite. It was like a headache that never actually _starts_ , you just get all this build-up and no finale. Really leaves a lady unfinished, you know?”

Gordon _really_ is looking a little strange now. “Like dental surgery…”

“What?”

“When you get numbed before they fix a cavity…” Gordon blinks, after a second. “Nevermind, just- nevermind.”

“Got anything you want to get off your chest, new friend? Seen anything weird lately?”

“No,” Gordon says, but even this sad clown can tell he’s lying, at least a little. “Can you tell me anything about the b- the man who attacked you in the square?”

“Big, tall, dark, handsome. Gets what you’re thinking. Lets you do most of the talking, a good date, you know? Mean left hook though. Think my kidneys don’t like him as much as the rest of me. I can believe the rumours.”

“Rumours?”

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” The Joker grins, grins like it means something. “They say the Batman ain’t _human_.”

* * *

Even when quiet, the cave is full of noises; the squeaks of the nesting bats, the humm of power generators, the clicking of the computer keys as Bruce tries to write out notes and research his cases. It’s usually a comfortable feeling, the sense of life around him, even while trapped beneath the earth.

And usually all he has to do is open his senses, neglect to dull everything down and he can lose himself in noise and dim scents. He can forget the rough nights and the long days and just _work_.

But it’s not working like that this morning. This morning, they’re calling the man in the red hood and in the purple suit the _Joker_.

The Joker, the news says. The clown of chaos, the maniac of madness; his laughing, mocking display has attracted even more attention than the fires he’d set and every time Bruce turns on the radio or the television, he sees footage of that shrieking man, dressed in violet and blood, He hears what people are saying about the man, this vile creature they’re all enraptured by.

Bruce can still smell the man’s blood, scrubbed from his suit but lingering in the air. He can still feel the harsh bite and pull of the man’s mind, desperate for companionship, even hours later. His hands are shaking no matter what he does and the quick memories of a contact that had lasted only minutes just won’t _leave him alone_.

Gotham is restless too, whispering wordless things from behind his skull. Gotham is curious, excited, hateful. Gotham is _loud_ today and all Bruce wants to do is sleep.

He tells himself he did the right thing. He tells himself this isn’t his _problem_ anymore. He tells himself it’s over, even though some distant feeling tells him it’s _not_.

But it still feels like a failure even though it’s _not_.

* * *

Gotham hisses, murmurs, hums at him, the Joker as the sun climbs the sky, the air still tasting of smoke. _Do you like it?_ Gotham says, _do you like this name? This destiny? So joyous, so loud, my little clown, won’t you show them all a good time?_

“The best, darling,” he whispers back, skin sore and spirits soaring. “My tongue, my throat, my voice is yours; do with them all that you will.”

And Gotham laughs, at him and the bat, at the cops and the doctors and at all the funny things this city has to witness, and he laughs along with it.

* * *

“Rumours, we’re chasing rumours of monsters now?”

“Harvey,” Jim sighs, massaging his blooming headache as traffic slows to a halt. “We are assigned to this case. Its our _job_ to investigate all leads.”

“He was literally dressed as a fucking clown. A fucking clown. He blew a raspberry as Jules loaded him into the squad car last night.” Harvey sips his coffee with an unusual amount of disapproval. “He let a man dressed as a bat beat the crap out of him. He is not only crazy, he’s _crazy_ -crazy. As in unreliable. As in, stuff him in a hospital and forget we ever saw him.”

Jim doesn’t respond, at least not right away. Gotham is miserable today, overclouded and usually cold for September and it doesn’t help Jim shake off the bad feeling lurking in his gut.

_A man pays attention when he starts remembering things he hasn’t thought about in a long, long time._

“Harvey, has anything _really_ strange ever happened to you in Gotham?” Jim glances at him from the driver’s seat. “I mean, something that maybe seems sort of alright at first and then the more you think about it, the stranger it gets?”

Harvey looks a bit uncomfortable at his question. “Jim, that’s honestly a hole you shouldn’t look in. Some stones are best left unturned.”

“What’s _that_ suppose to mean?”

“It means you weren’t born here, Jim.” Harvey sighs, not looking at Jim. “I know people give you shit for not being from Gotham originally, but you have to understand it makes a difference when it comes to some things. If you saw something odd, look the other way. Gotham doesn’t like it when strangers see things they shouldn’t have.”

“I’ve lived here for seventeen years,” Jim snaps, “I’m not exactly _new_.”

“But you weren’t born here,” Harvey says softly, like it _matters_. “Jim, look, honestly I don’t believe half of the stuff. It’s old wives’ tales and childhood dares, most don’t take it seriously.”

But Harvey’s done many strange things over the years and Jim knows it. “You believe some of it though.”

“Well... you know… there are... some people... who say Gotham won’t show you its secrets unless you’re born here,” Harvey fiddles with his coffee cup, “or- you know- Gotham accepts you.”

The parking lot finally comes up and Jim pulls into an empty spot, turning off the ignition but not getting out of the car. “Harvey, we’ve never talked about this before.”

His partner shrugs. “My dad always said you shouldn’t tell people what they were missing.”

“And now?” And now, with a clown making claims about a bat and a mysterious vanishing rookie cop.

Harvey smiles - a rare, tired smile - before he gets out of the car. “Jim, if you’re seeing something now, it means Gotham’s made up its mind. You should be prepared.”

It’s almost too cold outside and Jim pulls his jacket closer, surveying the strange storefront they were about to go into. “If you think I should be prepared, why don’t you want to investigate these rumours? It might actually mean something, if you believe that sort of thing.”

But Harvey just snorts. “Jim, there’s old wives tale and then there’s just _crazy_. Strange or not, I’ve never heard of anything like the Batman before. He’s probably just some weird asshole in a cape and everyone’s freaking out. Let’s just talk to these people this clown mentioned and forget we ever had to do this at all.”

* * *

“The Batman? I don’t want anything to do with _that_ , leave me out of it.”

* * *

“First I heard about him was on the news this morning.”

* * *

“I thought I saw him - you know, _him_ \- a while ago, but I don’t know… er, I was a _little_ drunk and it was all really strange, you know? He didn’t seem to be _human_.”

* * *

“The bat? Fuck man, you’re trying to drag me into _that_ mess?

* * *

“I… I guess I’ve heard a _few_ things. They say Gotham might be his _territory_ now, if you know what I mean.”

* * *

“I dunno… is this going to be traced back to me? Will _he_ find out?”

* * *

“The Batman? Heard he’s a shapeshifter. My friend said she saw him turn into a cloud of bats.”

* * *

“I swear, I didn’t have anything to do with _nothing_ , you tell him to fuck off!”

* * *

“Look, this is bigger than just you or me, they say he’s death, justice personified- I’m not getting involved in this.”

* * *

“He’s immortal, no doubt about it. I saw him a month or two ago; he got shot at by some gang member and he didn’t even _bleed.”_

* * *

“I was standing right there and he was- he was- he just appeared! He just appeared right behind me, I didn’t hear a single _thing_. Smelt something like smoke though…”

* * *

“I heard he killed a bunch of people and ate them.”

* * *

“My friend said he saw the bat turn someone into, like, a zombie or something.”

* * *

“I think he can read people’s _minds_.”

* * *

“Listen man, there is no way, no how, that I would get involved in any of this mess, _don’t dig into this_.”

* * *

“Harvey, did we spend four hours going around most of Gotham to learn that everyone and their mother thinks the Batman is some type of supernatural creature and they want nothing to do with him?”

“I think we did.”

“You’re a little worried now, aren’t you.”

“A little.”

* * *

The sound of Alfred putting a tray down jolts Bruce out of his wiring process. He blinks through the lensed goggles, clearing his mind of mental schematics and putting his tools down for the first time in hours.

(He tells himself he has work to do and it’s not because he’s avoiding thinking of the Joker.)

“I appreciate the lights,” Alfred says quietly. “I… wouldn’t want to ruin any of your work.”

“The…? Oh.” The red lights Bruce had installed just before they’d gone to see Lucius. “They don’t affect my vision as much. Figured it would work better for you.”

“It’s better than the dark,” Alfred replies, voice still so low and body held limp on purpose, “So I thank you. I took the liberty of warming up some of the blood you’d restocked in the freezer, as well.”

“Hmm,” Bruce absently grabs for the cup and draws it closer without drinking. “Thanks, I haven’t fed in a while.” Now if only he could get this thing to do what he wants it too. Perhaps he should take up Lucius’ standing offer and see what the engineer has to say on it.

“You… have been spending a lot of time down here,” Alfred says after a few moments. “I wasn’t sure if… you were still angry with me or not.”

Bruce pauses, the cup half raised to his mouth. “I’m… not angry, Alfred. Things have been busy lately. I…” It’s not a lie and he _knows that_ even if it feels like one. “I’ve just been busy.”

“You’ve barely said anything to me for nearly a week. I… have I said something wrong for... your kind? Offended you or rejected something? Lucius said he thinks I should apologize and I understand that I shouldn’t have told him-”

“Alfred, not all of this comes back to how you feel about this,” Bruce says, a weary tone in his voice. “You were wrong, I was wrong, we were both wrong and we’re both unhappy about this. This wasn’t… your mistake. I’ve been busy.”

“I’ve done _something_ to upset you.”

Bruce turns and frowns, peeling off the goggles and flicking on the red lamp sitting on the workbench. “Alfred, _this isn’t about you_. I am- I am not upset at you.”

“But you are upset.”

And now that’s a whole other kettle of fish. “It has nothing to do with you.” Liar but _not_.

“Then what’s getting to you?”

“It’s complicated.” And that was the truth. “This... is getting complicated. I’m-” dare he speak? “-I’m not sure if I’m doing this right.”

“This being…”

“The Batman.” And it hurt to even say the words. “Have you- did you see the news? With the man, the-”

“The Joker.”

The clown, the mess, the blood on his hands.

Bruce draws in a useless breath. “I think... he’s my fault.”

“Gotham does have a _reputation_ of dubious characters, Bruce, if I do say so myself.”

“But…” But, but, _but_. “Alfred, he was the man at the factory.” Air. He needs air. “He was- he fell and I couldn’t reach him in time. He fell right into that vat and I couldn’t reach him without revealing what I was so I _didn’t_ and I think I… I think…” Bruce pauses, tries to breath, tries to breath away this pain in his chest. “I think it might be my fault, that he’s like that. I think the fall just… _broke_ him and if I had been willing to reveal my powers, I would have saved him.” He shivers, rubs a hand over his face and wishes he could _sleep_. “I made him. I created him. I broke him.”

“Bruce, no man is broken just because of a _fall_. He couldn’t have been sane to break from just that. It wasn’t your fault.” Alfred shifts and gives Bruce some kind expression he recognizes all too well. “It was an accident.”

Bruce knows that expression. He’s seen it before. Over and over, for years and years-

“I am not a _child_.”

Alfred blinks, stunned but not shocked. “I did not say you were.”

“But you treat me like one - this _isn’t my fault_ \- it damn well _is_!” And that’s what he’s been avoiding all day, isn’t it. “There’s no way it could be _less_ my fault! Everything I’ve done, it led to one _stupid_ moment, which I fucked up and then _didn’t fix_. He’s sitting in Arkham with no name and no future and it’s _my fault_.”

“Bruce-”

“I have to fix this,” he says, because he’s been dead nearly seventeen years and it’s starting to get to him a little. “I will fix this. I’ll fix him.”

“Bruce, you can’t fix everything,” Alfred whispers in response.

“But I have to try,” Bruce says, “I have to try.”

* * *

But like all good men doomed to failure, it was so much harder than just that.

_Trying_ was not always enough.

* * *

Intake interviews are boring, but at least he’s got a roof over his head today, even if not full of bats. His cell - well, _room_ but it’s got an awful lot of looks for one of those - is all outfitted with everything a man needs and it’s like Christmas in July.

Well, maybe more like Thanksgiving in September, with nosey Aunt Bertha and racist Uncle Bob.

The Joker giggles a little to himself, throwing his weight around a little to test the bounce of the mattress. A disappointing amount, but a man can only ask for so much, he supposes. Arkham wasn’t _really_ part of the plan, but a mastermind can work with what he’s got.

Hmm. The plan. The plan. How the plan has come tumbling down like all the king’s men. He hadn’t meant for this to happen. The bat is good at toppling plans. The bat’s been at it for _months_ ; wrecking mob plans and killer plans and burglary plans and it seems you can’t try to trick the _vending machine_ without the bat messing with that too.

_But_ , but, but. This plan. Oh, this plan. The bat had swooped down from hell itself and laid his claws into the clown’s flesh and Gotham has deemed the act worthy of a name. He hadn’t expected to _exist_ for this long and honestly the whole thing’s making his head hurt.

Well.

Or something _like that_.

But who is he to argue with Gotham?

The Joker lays back on the bed and closes his eyes, breathing as deeply and slowly as he dares. He’s only done this a couple of times, when the world had trembled a bit too much and he couldn’t keep white from red and up from down. He’d only done this a few times in his whole life, the entire month that it’s lasted so far. He’s only tried it a few times, because, well-

Usually it doesn’t work.

But _today_ Gotham has gifted him. _Yesterday_ the bat gifted him as well. Perhaps today it will work.

_Do you remember the factory?_

Today he does.

Today the factory is a hot, hot, painful memory that floats fully formed in his mind. The things from _before_ he’d died and been reborn are a bit fuzzy, shiny around the edges and unstable, but he recalls the fall, the sight of the bat _reaching_ and then nothing but pain-pain-pain-suffering-for-his-sins until he’d found the vat edge and pulled himself up and over to the floor, the world too bright and hurtful now but at least he was _alive_.

Hmm.

That’s odd.

He’s been recalling that memory for weeks now, and every time it had been harder to organize in order, harder to visualize, harder to understand. But today it’s _cooperating_.

Oh, what had come next? He’d wanted to find the bat but then the cops had come and his skin had been _burning_ so he’d put off the confrontation and-

The Joker sits up. He blinks. He looks around the room.

What had he done next? He’d been thinking of the bat, hadn’t he, that the bat ain’t never killed nobody and would be pretty upset if he died too. He’d- he’d cleaned himself up somewhere? He’d stopped the burning and started thinking about the bat again-

The factory with the bat. That stolen apartment where he’d thought of the bat. The cash he’d taken for food while whispering to a bat not even there that he needed this to _survive_ and please don’t punish him for it. Then the rumours about the bat he’d started to chase and the _outfit_ he’d put together for the bat and-

Bat. Bat. Bat. Bat. _Bat_. Week one, week two, week three, week four, _grand finale_.

_This_ _will never change_ , the bat had howled at him, sinking claws in his sinking mind. _This will never change_. This. Will. Never. Change.

He could _remember_.

“I can remember,” Joker gasps to an empty room. “I can _remember_ the bat!”

His mind had taken everything it could and had eaten it all. It had misplaced his memory, it had warped his senses, it had poisoned his emotions. But the _bat_ , that fallen god, oh so glorious, had declared to a faithful subject that the bat _would never change_.

And what the bat had declared could not be altered. The Joker had lost everything and was losing the rest from this swiss cheese of a brain. Everything except the _bat_. The bat was safe now. The bat could never be forgotten or changed by faulty wiring.

“Oh thank you,” he whispers to the empty walls, “oh thank you, my bat, my darling. I don’t know what you’ve done, but I _like it_.”

* * *

“I’m not entirely sure what I did, to be honest.”

“Is that bad?”

Bruce frowns at Lucius as the older man pulls apart the prototype he’d spent the morning on. “I don’t like doing things I don’t know the consequences of.”

“Some of the greatest discoveries of humanity have been consequences,” Lucius says, ripping out wires with a casual ease, “but I imagine you’re one of those people who values control over the unknown.”

“I value safety,” Bruce replies, “discovery is useless if we’re not alive to enjoy it.”

“I thought you couldn’t die?” Lucius looks up in amusement, but drops it after seeing the look on Bruce’s face.

Bruce slowly unclenched his hands, checking that he hadn’t broken anything before he shrugs. “It’s honestly a little more complicated than that.”

But everything seems to be these days.

He has to decide what to do about the clown.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the company, but I have a feeling you didn’t just come by because of technical difficulties.” Lucius says, casually and with a careful ease. “If something’s on your mind, I’m more then capable of not discussing it with Alfred if you’d like…?”

“It’s… nothing you can help me with,” Bruce replies in a low tone. Tries to ignore the guilty twinge that says _don’t push people away_. “This… problem seems to be directed at- well, me, I suppose.”

“The news last night?”

There aren’t really words for that one, so Bruce nods instead and tries not to notice the way Lucius surveys his face. “I wouldn’t worry,” the inventor says after a moment, “I imagine it’ll all blow over in a week.”

But that’s not what his instincts are telling him. “Its bigger than that. The Joker is-”

* * *

He is _drowning_ , he _can’t breath_ , he is alive for a split second after a lifetime of being dead.

Lazarus consumes him.

* * *

“-the Joker has escaped from-”

“-your Robin is gon-”

“-cannot be saved! None of us can be-”

“-fifteen are dead-”

“-bat has become a m-”

“-clown is unstop-”

“-at how many fear him!”

“-without him you are _nothing_ -”

“-this the world you want to live in-”

“-who’s ever heard of a hero dressing up as a _bat_ -”

“-you did this, you caused-”

“-Gotham has fallen-”

“-long as the Joker lives, you and your _batman_ will never know peace, Bruce Wayne.”

* * *

“-? Bruce? You blanked out there for a second, are you alright?”

“I…” Bruce blinks as the room comes back into focus. “I apologize, I was… remembering something I had seen before.”

“Something useful?” Lucius asks, a look similar to amusement and curiosity on his face.

“It... ” Bruce shivers with the feeling of the pit dripping off of him, “It might have been.”

* * *

He has to wait. He has to wait for the bat to come to _him_. That’s how it works.

The Joker has been born twice over, once from acid and once from the _bat_. He is made anew of flesh and bone, all the things left from his old life scraped from the inside of his skull like innards from a pumpkin. Nothing he knew remains and so he is forced to asked himself.

Who is the Joker? Who is this man, named by Gotham, named for the bat? Who is the Joker, arsonist and mental patient, who is the creature in this cage of blood and skin?

( _my child,_ Gotham murmurs, but everyone’s Gotham’s children. _Soon, very soon_.)

He doesn’t know who he is yet, but he knows he has to wait. He wouldn’t have existed at all, if the bat had not struck him down like a lightning strike to scorch the ground. Nothing is the same now. He is just pleased to have _seen_ it, but to have _participated_ was beyond another matter entirely.

Oh, the bat will come for him. The bat had answered his prayers. The bat had seen his troubles and given him a gift in return. Gods don’t just _ignore_ their subjects after that. They create, they behold, they rule, they _control_. The two of them are destined to meet again.

The bat will come for him.

* * *

Ra’s al Ghul never told him how much of Lazarus’ visions could be real.

Bruce hasn’t really frequented supernatural communities since before the temple, but he doesn’t realize how much he misses it until he strolls into the witch’s shop and breaths in the sense of _magic_ floating everywhere. He’d forgotten how good it feels not to be the strangest thing in the immediate vicinity.

The teenage cashier looks up from her book as the bell rings and stares in amazement as Bruce comes in like he’s here every weekend. “Er- can I help you?” She asks, clearly wondering how he got past the enchantments turning away non-witches.

“Actually, yes,” Bruce says with a toothless smile. He tries not to blink too hard through the new contact lenses Lucius had given him before he’d had left. “I was wanting to look at what lore books you have, I need to clarify something.”

“Oh, um, what creature are you looking for-” the young witch stops after a moment, “er- are you looking for yourself or…?”

“I am looking for books you may have on visions,” Bruce says, trying to keep the amusement from his tone and the fear from his gut. “I can assure you, I know plenty about myself.”

The witch doesn’t look too sure, but she jumps down from her stool and waves him into a side room. “Ee have some in the back - are you new here? I’ve been seeing a lot of new people lately, they say they’re here because Gotham’s now a territory.”

“Really?” Bruce ducks through the beaded door curtain into a cramped room of wall-to-wall shelves. “I’m from the city originally, I’ve been out of town for a while, I’m still getting used to the changes.” The room smells like old paper and he ignores the thought that Ra’s would have loved some of these books.

“Eh, it’s probably nothing,” she snorts and begins to poke at the spines of a several large tomes. “I mean, there’s no way _one_ person could hold Gotham, I’ve heard of people dying from trying to hold a block. People just like to talk.”

“You never know,” Bruce says, and knows the book the instant it falls into his hands. “Ah, I think this might be what I’m looking for.”

The witch blinks in confusion, glancing down at the leather-bound thing in his grasp. “That’s… not about visions. That’s about-”

“I’m aware,” Bruce smiles, all charm and no bite, teeth and eyes hidden behind the glamour she can sense but not break. “How much?”

* * *

Bruce recalls so little of Lazarus. He always preferred that to remembering. He has always appreciated the lack of nightmares, but for once it’s not helping as much as it usually does.

A lifetime, the Lazarus Pit had shown him. Many lifetimes, the Lazarus Pit had tormented him with. Endless possibilities and he must have seen a couple hundred, maybe more.

Three years ago, when he’d been younger, more inexperienced, only Ra’s for a friend, only Alfred for family, those possibilities had seemed beyond his reach. He had forgotten half of the relevant things out of sheer lack of context. 

But now he’s back in Gotham and the Batman is _real_ , he is _real_. The Joker is now, real.

He has seen the Joker before.

The Joker was always real, he supposes, but the memories Bruce has of a pit showing him destruction and obsession and many countless other things had not made sense until now. How could he have known what the Joker would become? How could he have known who the Joker was suppose to come _from_.

He hadn’t known.

He hadn’t seen the factory. Not even Lazarus had shown him that.

But he’s seen it now. He’s _seen_ the future. He’s seen much of what will come and much that won’t. And Ra’s had always said -

_Lazarus wouldn’t show you the future if you couldn’t change it_.

The Joker’s sitting in Arkham right now, not even a day into his sentence. Meeting with him would be easy. Speaking to him, possibly harder. But-

Bruce remembers deaths that haven’t happened yet. He remembers lives that are as of now intact. But it won’t stay that way if he doesn’t _act_.

He has to talk to the Joker.

And Bruce has to convince him to do what is it _right_.

* * *

Gotham has the kindest cruelty the Joker’s ever heard of.

He’s been in here less than a day and while he already wants to ram his head against the wall, he’s resisted. Gotham had told him soon and anyways, he doesn’t even have the excuse that it’s a _padded_ cell, which would have been fun at least the first time. How rude, really, that they house him with all this screaming maniacs and delightful droolers when he’s so much more important than them.

He huffs and shakes green hair from his eyes. It’s not even that fun to scream along with them; they don’t even _notice_ he’s doing it. This whole experience has been less than then five stars so far, that’s for sure. All work and no play, it seems. 

But he’s been waiting and waiting and waiting all day and the bat _does_ come for him, as the lights flicker out. He’d been busy pulling the stuffing out of the mattress when he senses something like a tingle in the back of his mind, like static electricity making his hair stand up on end. The scent’s a bit weak too, but he swears he almost smells something burning.

And he turns and the bat is _there_ , looming in the doorway without even a sound to have announced his entrance.

“You know, some people _knock_ ,” the Joker purrs playfully, abandoning the fluff to fall, feeling Gotham’s thrill in the back of his mind. “I’m not sure you ever learned social niceties, considering how you greeted me yesterday, but there’s always room for improvement.”

The bat doesn’t answer immediately. He tilts his head back and forth and surveys the room, as if judging Joker’s mischievous pastimes. Honestly! What does the bat expect this poor clown to do with his spare time? Paint a portrait? Take up knitting? Destroy everything?

Well, alright. He had destroyed _some_ things. Not all of the things. Most of them, maybe. But not all.

“I have an attention span problem, apparently,” Joker provides in explanation, “or at least that was part of their _guess_ , I’m not sure some of those fools were even doctors. Didn’t seem like the type.”

The bat looks some more and that feeling curls back around the edge of his head, that _pressure_ like last night and oh, he _wants_ it, he wants to _hear_ the little bat without ever hearing a _sound_ -

“I would like to talk,” the Batman said, “do you mind if I sit down?”

Whoa. Hmm. Manners after all. So kind and courteous, like someone’s mother did a bang-up job. “Be my guest, dear bat, though there isn’t much room to spare.”

The bat didn’t seem to mind. He just sits down on the foot of the bed, down from Joker’s cross-legged position on the sole miserable pillow, looking oddly engrossed in the carvings Joker had started on the far wall.

“You’re going mad,” the bat says after a moment. “This is destroying you, isn’t it.”

“Er, peachy-cakes, don’t know if you noticed on your _stroll_ last night, but I ain’t exactly-”

“You are deteriorating rapidly and this place will make it worse.”

The clown grins with all his teeth, something with little mirth in it, but he can only do so _much_ with what he’s got. “I see you’re an expert now, isn’t that so? Got a day job working here, perhaps?”

For the first time, the bat turns and looks right at him, those lensed eyes boring quickly into his soul and-

Oh, _there_ it is. The bat has sunk his claws right back into this fragmented mess of a mind and it is _delicious_. So perfect. Like the heaviest weight in the world just baring him down… down… down to the ocean floor…

The clown feels the distant sensation of his body relaxing and hitting the wall behind him as he wavers. Everything’s so loose and delightful under the pressure. It’s better than yesterday by such a long shot; neither of them so frantic, neither of them so surprised. Everything’s just _ready,_ like they were both waiting for this.

And then the presence withdraws.

“I apologize,” the bat says like he _means it_ , “I’m not sure that-” and he pauses, “you’re different from yesterday.”

“Ooooohhhh, like a whole new trade-in darling,” the Joker cackles, arms stretched above his head as he slides down until he’s flat on the bed, hands clawing for a sky he can’t see. “I didn’t catch it right away myself but you sure did a number upstairs. I feel _great_! The best I’ve ever felt!”

The bat doesn’t look so sure about that. “You’re doing better than I was expecting you to be. Was that from what I did?”

Was it from him? Was it from _him_? Did he not know? Did he not _intend_?

(If that was what he did by accident, what could he do on _purpose_?)

“Are you telling me you were shuffling around up there yesterday just for the giggles, batty dear? And here I thought I _meant_ something.” Suddenly he doesn’t want to stretch for the ceiling. His throat feels a little weird. There’s something like a shake starting in his chest and he isn’t sure what it is but he doesn’t _like it_ and his fingers are quivering too much to be held up after only a minute. “I really, really did think-”

A cool hand, heavy and leathery lands on his forehead, the black-glad forearm blocking the rest of his vision. “I need you to breath for me.”

_This_ time is not the same as last time and nothing like the first. Last time was peaceful and gentle, the first wild and dangerous and this is… mathematical, purposeful. He feels the sensation prickle first in one area and go to another. Things that feel like memories shift and thoughts get pushed back into their knocks and crannies as the bat moves past. It’s a surprising amount of order for so much chaos.

If he closes his eyes - and it's so tempting, oh look, he’s done it - he can almost see it, a vast space of swirling colour and destruction that the bat prowls though, likes he’s _hunting_ something.

Hmm, really, you’d think he would know where to look, if he’d fixed it in the first place. But hey, he supposes some of the greatest art was made by _accident_ -

_This will never change_.

The memory blossoms so quickly in his mind it almost hurts, the bruises throbbing, the missing ground hard beneath his back, his whole being hot and bothered from the heat of the flames no longer there. He remembers the bat sinking into the quicksand of his mind and when the bat had hit the bottom the clown hadn’t even known had _existed_ -

Oh, he sees what the bat did. The bat had taken that memory at the factory, where the bat had tried to _save him_ and he’d made sure this little clown would never ever forget it.

The bat had wanted the clown to remember he was worth saving.

Oh.

_Okay_.

That wasn’t what he’d thought the bat had meant.

Why would the bat think _that_.

_Why would I not?_ asks the whisper in his head, so deep and so _kind_ , a lot and nothing at all like Gotham. _You think so highly of me, why would you think I wouldn’t care?_

Well, nobody _cares_ , Batty-bat. Nobody ever, _ever_ cares, not even Gotham really, not for people like _him_. He-

- _’s a fuckup if I ever saw one_ -

- _looks like some idiot’s idea of_ -

- _should never have survived_ -

- _a monster_ -

“You remember a lot more pain then you claim to,” the bat says out loud, though it sounds awfully far away. “You’ll lie to even yourself about it, but so much of it is still _there_.”

Well, if that’s how it’s gonna be then, his memories can all fuck off. How rude. So unprofessional. You’d think amnesia would know how to do its job properly.

And he still doesn’t know why the bat cares.

_You are of Gotham and Gotham is mine._ The bat holds like a pillar of iron in his mind. _You are one of my people, you are_ important.

Oh little bat. Sweet little bat. How could he possibly believe that.

_It was once that way. I will make it that way again_.

And the idiot’s starting with him. Who taught this boy how to _prioritize_.

_I like a challenge_.

That’s a little obvious.

The sensation of the bat digging around settles and hovers just after the factory memory, in a dim, fragmented mess of images and thoughts that had been the clown before he was really a clown, his skin and mind burning as he tried to recover and recall what he’d seen of the bat.

_You remember me_.

But that was the _point_. The bat had made sure the memory of the bat would stick, but Joker had a _lot_ of memories of the bat and the Batman hadn’t been all that clear on what memories were suppose to stay.

_You remember_ everything _to do with me_.

Oh, of _course_ he does.

For all that the bat’s been in his head, it isn’t until a faint tickle of surprise not his own floats by that Joker realizes he can _feel the bat too_. Not a lot, not as much as before, but the bat is there, a lingering presence and he _wants-wants-wants_ this, wants this _attention_ , wants this _caring_ that the bat is giving him. He wants it so bad and he knows it’s going to _leave_ and that’ll honestly be the worst part.

_I need to think, but I’m not leaving._

And sure enough, the bat withdraws again, Joker’s mind scrambling to hold on for a moment until mental fingers pry his off and they separate.

It’s awfully empty in here by himself, but he supposes that’s normal. Not even Gotham stays for long.

When the clown finally pulls his eyes open, he feels nearly as worn out as he had after their first fight and the bat is standing by the wall, inspecting the scratch marks Joker had made with a screw like it was a picasso.

“You’re standing at a cross-roads,” the bat says after a moment. “You’ve committed a crime, but it wasn’t the worst thing you could have done. You haven’t made yourself irredeemable yet. On the other hand, you and I both know you can get a lot _worse_. Gotham might not be able to handle how worse you can get.”

“You need to work on your pep talks,” Joker says, flinging an arm over his eyes. There’s a headache forming somewhere and he feels like he’s been rung out to dry. How can he be expected to perform under these conditions?

“Right now, you need me.” The bat hesitates and even this clown can see he’s got a _bad idea_. “You’re as lost in your own mind as everyone is to treat it. I might be the only one who can do _anything_ to help you.”

Pretty confident for someone who hadn’t even _known_ what he had done, but Joker supposes he would be too with that much power. “I sense a but-but- _but_.”

“I won’t help a criminal.” And _there’s_ the bad idea, hard and bitter in the set of the bat’s jaw. “I _saw_ your plans; if you hurt something, if you _kill_ someone, I won’t help you. I’ll leave you to rot. Or-”

He stops. And Joker _gets_ the or. “Let me guess, little bat. If you can go into someone’s mind and change it, I bet you can control it too.” And isn’t _that_ a fun thought. “Soooo… if I don’t _play along_ all nice like and start doing things your way, I’ll get the puppet treatment, right?”

“I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to,” the bat says after a moment, a miserable slump to his shoulders. “I _can_ control people, but it requires total concentration. And you’re strong. Fragmented, but strong. You might be able to break it.”

Hmm. Good to know. Which is probably why the bat told him. After all, the bat wants the clown to _trust him_ and revealing a weakness and dispelling a worry is a good start.

“Can you make the guards outside dance the waltz?”

“I could, but I’m not going to.”

“ _Someone’s_ no fun.”

There’s something like a _twitch_ in the corner of the bat’s exposed mouth for a split second before it disappears. It’s the strangest thing he’s ever seen.

Though this whole thing is one of the strangest things he’s ever seen too. Bats wanting to work with clowns. There has to be more too this, even _he_ isn’t sure it’s a good idea.

“What exactly are you offering, Bats?” The Joker says, forcing himself up into a half sitting position, braced on his elbows. “Everyone knows it’s you, yourself and you - gonna tell me you need a well-dressed clown on your team now to make it all work? You need someone to make you look _sane_ in comparison? Perhaps a patsy for your next big bust? The offer’s tempting, but I’m not too sure exactly _what you’re asking of me_.”

The bat hesitates, unsure perhaps, maybe not keen otherwise. “You need me and I… have use for you. You might not remember it, but I’ve _seen_ your memories. You have information I can’t easily get; names, faces, dirt. The mafias, the gangs, people with a lot of bad connections and worse records.”

“I highly doubt I know enough to get any real use out of this whole thing, Batty-dear,” the clown crocks his head, “why not just pull that information out in that case and find those people yourself? I can hardly see you _needing_ me around, at least not long enough to warrant a deal.”

“I can’t _copy_ your memories,” the bat says with a shake of his head, “I can see them and remember what I saw, but that’d be remembering the viewing, not remembering it from _your_ perspective. And to view them all, in enough detail for them to be of use, would take me days alone and I would never be able to process them all to the extent you could.”

“The more I hear you describe it, the less useful this power seems to be.”

“It’s a curse, not a power.”

“Oh God, you’re one of _those_ people. This may be too much for me to handle.” The Joker drops back onto the bed and scowling a bit at the ceiling. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Okay. Best laid plans and- alright, they hadn’t been _that_ great and honestly this one was _better_ but hey, he’s new, he doesn’t have a lot of practice. “Look, Batsy - hey, I like that one - Batsy, darling, dear, I admit, you drive a hard bargain- well, not really, you’re more a _my way or the highway_ kinda guy but it's the thought that counts-”

He pauses, rubbing a hand against the pain between his eyes. “I’m not interested in being your pet clown, I don’t like being _used_.” The thought sends a shiver down his spine he can’t really recall. “I may owe you a debt; after all, it’s because of _you_ that I’m alive, it’s because of you that I have a _name_ , it’s because of you that I can remember things without it taking half hour and a chicken club sandwich but even with your little explanation, I somehow seriously doubt that you need me around to get all the information that you need.”

There’s the shake again, deep inside his chest, threatening to unseat him from the world and cast him into space, threatening to reduce him to dust in a nameless grave. “Batsy, Batsy, what do you _really_ want from me?”

There’s no answer. The bat’s still standing, staring at the wall, head bowed as if- honestly, he doesn’t even know why. He’s been expecting many things - even the beating the guard is sure to give him when the poor sap sees what Joker has done to the mattress. He’s even been expecting a visit from the Batman, but _this_.

There has to be something more to this. There has to be more to all of this. People didn’t just offer _everything_ you want without a catch, that isn’t how life _works_. It isn’t how his life works and there is no way that he can fall this deep into this whole- this whole mess! Only to find out that surprise! Everything is getting better! You’re going to be okay!

No, no it doesn’t work like that at all. Not for him.

“This isn’t what you want,” the bat says, turning his head to give the clown an empty stare from behind the cowl’s lenses. “It’s not going to be _easy_. It’s not going to be some grand adventure. You help me, I help you. If it works, you go free. If you mess up, you _stay_ _here_ and I make sure you _never_ _leave_.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then this is the end of me playing _nice_.”

Oh so _vicious_ , so delightful. It makes Joker show all his teeth in a wicked grin. The bat may be kind, the bat may want to _help_ , but there is a cruelty there, lurking beneath the surface.

Just like Gotham.

The bat has given him a choice. It’s not really a choice at all.

And that’s the _best part_.

“Hehehe, oh _Batsy_ , you know a thing or two about backing people into corners, don’t you?” Clever, clever. Hunt the prey like a lovely little predator, see what happens when someone’s _trapped_ , find out how the weak handle _pressure_ from the biggest, baddest bat of them all.

Oh Bats, you’re _good_.

“And if I decide to say yes?”

“Then,” and there it _is_ , the tiniest of smirks at the corner of the bat’s mouth, like the sunrise after a lifetime of darkness, “you just have to find me and tell me in person.”

And then the bat is _gone_.

The Joker blinks, pushing himself back up into a sitting position. The cell is completely empty and there isn’t a single sign the bat was even there at all. He pats his forehead, feeling the spot the bat had touched, even though there isn’t a mark there either.

The door hadn’t opened, no alarms had gone off, but the bat had _surely_ been there. He’d felt the bat’s hand on his own skin. There is no way, no how that it hadn’t _happened_.

“Oh Batsy, Batsy- _darling_ ,” he whispers to the walls, “what a challenge, what a delight. We’re going to have so much _fun,_ you and I.”

_Oh you will_ , Gotham whispers in return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to RosemaryBagels and J-Not-Joker-Not-Jack-Just-J for beta'ing and to Skullprins and Kvchill who made things for UtR! You should check out the links below and give them all the likes and reblogs!

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr at [AshToSilver](http://ashtosilver.tumblr.com/) where I release previews, yell about writing and sometimes am vaguely amusing!
> 
> Many thanks to my betas [RosemaryBagels](http://rosemarybagels.tumblr.com/) and [J-Not-Jack-Not-Joker-Just-J](http://j-not-joker-not-jack-just-j.tumblr.com/), as well as my professional cheerleader [Zapiarty](http://zapiarty.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Under The Road's official theme song is [**Wherever I Go**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jclnm-0ktHM) by _OneRepublic_ , suggested by [Zapiarty](http://zapiarty.tumblr.com/). Bonus song is [**Blood On My Name**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz5Mx3a8kRw) by _The Brothers Bright_.
> 
> There is art of Under The Road!
> 
> Thanks to [Zapiarty](http://zapiarty.tumblr.com/) who drew the end of chapter three: [this... will never change](http://zapiarty.tumblr.com/post/149025258765/).
> 
> Thanks to [Skullprins](http://skullprins.tumblr.com/) who did an [aesthetics edit of Under The Road](http://skullprins.tumblr.com/post/150208645081/inspired-by-ashtosilver-fanfic-under-the-road).
> 
> Thanks to [Kvchill](http://kvchill09.tumblr.com/) who drew [a couple of vampires and joker](http://kvchillart.tumblr.com/post/150471014674/some-character-sketches-for-ashtosilver) as well as [kid-vampire!Bruce knocking out a much large opponent](http://kvchillart.tumblr.com/post/150471149939/a-sketch-of-tiny-vampire-bruce-knocking-out-the) (because he would).


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